Raul Rojas, a Los Angeles gang member who became a world boxing champion in 1968, has died. He was 70. His daughter, Rebecca, tells the Los Angeles Times ( http://lat.ms/KmsSdd) that Rojas died Sunday of natural causes. Rojas grew up in Watts and East Los Angeles. Two of his brothers went to prison. According to a 1968 Sports Illustrated article, Rojas led a street gang and wound up in juvenile hall after a battle during which a fellow gangster was shot to death next to him. Rojas turned to boxing and in 1968 he defeated Enrique Higgins to win the World Boxing Association featherweight belt. He surrendered it six months later. He ended his career in 1970 with a record of 38-7-2 with 24 knockouts. He later worked as a longshoreman.
''They may have been into drugs but they didn't do anything to harm anybody,'' said their aunt, Cheryl Watkins. ``It was cold-blooded murder to lay them out like that.''Miami-Dade County's 80th and 81st homicides of 2008: Rashawn and Deon Beneby, brothers and suspects in a string of violent robberies, shot dead Thursday afternoon next to the Liberty City middle school they once attended. ''It's cold-blooded, outright killing out there -- and we're not even in the summer yet,'' said the Rev. Richard Dunn, a community activist who lives three blocks away. Witnesses said a group of men were gathered outside an apartment at the Annie Coleman Gardens housing project when the shooting started.Someone mowed down the brothers, some 15 yards apart, on a grassy strip next to the chain-link fence that separates the community from the baseball field at Charles R. Drew Middle School, 1801 NW 60th St. Rashawn was executed -- shot in the head an...
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