Multiple violent offenders from Sacramento County have also been granted early release by CDCR in recent months.

Looking down at a bloodied and contused teenage boy lying helpless near the weeds, Charity Ann Williams – or “Aggro” as she’s known in train-hopping circles – announced that her “boots” were “going to end this.”

Another attacker heard those words.

The kid on the ground was 19-year-old John Alpert. He’d been pummeled in a four-on-one assault by individuals he thought were his new friends.

Alpert was a young man with visions of travel and adventure who’d grown up in a situation where such experiences seemed out of reach. But a random encounter with Williams and a trio of rail-riders in his hometown of Palmdale caused Alpert to reimagine that. After chatting with these free-wheeling trekkers, he wondered if hitching onto boxcars with them for a few months might show him the American West.

It was March of 2013. Less than two weeks into the trip, Alpert’s new companions turned on him. The group was roughing it at a well-worn tramp camp on the outskirts of Roseville when Alpert changed course. His disabled mother was worrying herself nearly to death back home. He had to go back.

Some kind of argument ensued between Alpert and the train-hoppers. All four jumped him. They were “beating the brakes off him,” as one of them later recalled.

A grimy, graffiti-tagged rail bridge was probably the last thing Alpert saw over the campfire light as the blows rained down.

Then there was a pause.

Alpert had been hammered so savagely that he couldn’t move. Two of the riders, Jules Carrillo and “Scary Laura Rocks” Kenner, appear willing to have called it a night. However, Williams and Edward “Stil-Eddo” Anauo dragged Alpert’s limp body over the dirt and away from the others. As the victim was crumpled helpless by a creek, Williams, then 27, had all the power. She’d already done prison time for attempting to stomp a Kansas City drifter to death in 2012. Court records indicate she’d confessed to feeling “a blood lust” during that episode. But that man had survived. John Alpert would not. Since getting out of lockup, Williams was reportedly always wearing black boots because they didn’t show blood. Now, those dark boots were “going to end this” – meaning they were going to end Alpert’s story.

It’s unclear how long Williams looked down at the defenseless face before stomping and kicking the life out of it.

SN&R followed the lengthy two-year homicide investigation in the aftermath, beginning with the discovery of Alpert’s mummified remains off PFE Road and ending with all four suspects getting captured in different parts of the country. Then, News & Review was present for the two-year legal saga that concluded with the hard-riders all getting sent to state prison. When SN&R’s long-form piece “Blood on the Tracks” hit stands, it ended with Williams being handed a sentence of 15-years-to-life for Second Degree Murder.

On January 16, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and two Board of Parole Hearing commissioners granted Charity Ann Williams an early release, just seven years after receiving her sentence and ten years after first being taken into custody.

While Williams’ parole proceedings have filled in narrative gaps for “Blood on the Tracks,” they also call into question a drumbeat from state officials that extremely violent offenders aren’t being granted early parole. So too have a number of Sacramento-related prisoner releases in recent months that involve men who committed startling and disturbing crimes. The trend has victim advocates wondering if there’s any semblance of truth in sentencing when it comes to California justice.

“The initial reaction from the survivors and victims who we work with, when they hear that the inmate is receiving a grant of parole, is a reaction of terror, disbelief and a sense they’re being torn apart,” said Christine Ward, Executive Director of Crime Victims Assistance Network I-CAN, an independent non-profit that helps victims and their loved ones navigate parole hearings. “I’ve seen this rip families apart. I’ve seen people just disappear. It’s devastating.”

Aggro’s past and first meeting with John Alpert

While transcripts for Williams’ latest parole hearing aren’t available yet, she appeared before Board of Parole commissioners just a year-and-a-half before, and SN&R did obtain those transcripts. 

Early into those proceedings, Williams was asked about her childhood. She described having suffered ongoing and sometimes extreme physical abuse from her father, mainly – in her telling – when he was drunk. She mentioned being thrown across a room into an armoire when she was little, as well as getting kicked in the ribs while she was sleeping as an older teen. Williams recalled her school years as a blur of underage drinking, chronic truancy and failure to hold down jobs. She was eventually running the streets. By early adulthood, Williams was on course to blend into America’s small, off-grind train-rider culture.

Williams was also asked how her group first met John Alpert. Williams said she was in Palmdale because her mother lived there, adding that she, Laura Kenner, Jules Carrillo and Edward Anauo were all standing in front of a store when the short teen with brushy hair started heading over to them.

“The four of us were extremely intoxicated and attempting to panhandle,” Williams remembered. “And he walked past us and was interested in what we were doing. So, he struck up a conversation with us … I believe he may have accompanied us to the spot where we were going to camp for the evening in a field. But he left that night, and we did not encounter him until the next morning. We were at a Starbucks in the area charging our cell phones; and that’s when he came and approached us about coming to travel with us.”  

“How long did you know him before you killed him?” Parole Commissioner Troy Taira asked.

“A couple of weeks,” Williams responded.

“Was he traveling with you the whole time?” Taira went on.

Williams said he was.

According to Roseville Police, after Williams delivered the death blows to John Alpert, the four train-hoppers stripped his clothes off, set his property on fire and divided up some gift cards in his wallet. They also used a dog bowl to try to dig a shallow grave for hiding his body. During Williams’ 2023 hearing, Taira brought that moment up.

“Whose idea was it to burn his clothing, steal his items?” the commissioner asked.

“We had all made that decision together; however, I take responsibility for that because it was my idea to get rid of the evidence, to burn it,” Williams replied, “and whatever was left over, it was a situation where whomever needed what, took whatever they needed.”

A train-ganger’s history of violence

Transcripts show that the parole officials in 2023 were very concerned about Williams’ entrenched history of “criminal thinking,” but apparently just as aware of her explosive tendencies.

“Anger, violence, rage, it’s just kind of a domino with you,” Deputy Parole Commissioner Christine Nijjer observed. “What was broken inside of you that was causing you to be so callous and not care about anything? You say it was a lot of apathy towards humans … You did not value humans. What’s driving that bus? What was broken?”

Williams answered that her anger was tied to her abusive upbringing. 

“Let’s talk about gangs,” Nijjer went on, “because you were involved in a gang, even though it wasn’t a formally labeled gang, right? You guys were a group of people and you did criminal activity together … What drove that behavior of wanting to belong to people that willingly hurt other people? That were willing to break the laws and just disregard anybody that’s not part of their circle?”

That question seems to have forced Williams to meditate on her bond with Kenner – whom she’d known for nearly a decade prior to the killing – as well as Carrillo and Anauo, whom she’d met more recently though ‘Scary Laura.’

“We all drank – we all raged against the machine,” Williams explained. “We were very much into anarchy and things like that. And, you know, do away with the government and let’s just run around and be hobos. And then, it sort of became like family … And that fed into the people-pleasing, as far as like, ‘Well, if I don’t go along with what they say, then they’re going to leave me, and I’ll be alone and then I’ll have no one.’”

Commissioner Taira also drilled down on Williams’ temper.

“Everybody was involved, but you were the one who killed him, right?” Taira asked.

“Yes, sir,” the inmate admitted.

“Tell us about the causation and your extreme violence on this 19-year-old,” Taira pressed.

Roseville homicide investigators, based on a series of incomplete confessions between members of the train gang, believe when Alpert declared that he was going home, the group started relentlessly bullying him. At some point, there was a dust-up between Alpert and Laura Kenner. During it, Kenner bit Alpert, and the victim hit Kenner. Sitting before the parole commissioners in 2023, Williams used Alpert’s possible self-defense as her reasoning for the slaying.

“I was very angry in the sense that I felt he disrespected Ms. Kenner, and he disrespected me, and he had disrespected our group,” Williams said about whatever contact happened between Alpert and Kenner. “At that point, I felt like he needed to be taught a lesson.” 

Commissioner Taira linked those comments to Williams’ attempt to stomp a transient in 2012.

“Now, the assault in Kansas City, I think that was the year prior,” Taira continued, “it seems like a very similar reaction. You beat this man because of some disrespect? Is that fair to say?

Williams agreed: “That is very fair to say, sir.” 

Charity’s plea for legal charity

Unlike what happened two weeks ago, the commissioners in 2023 denied Williams’ request for early parole. That decision had followed questions brought up at the time by Placer County Deputy District Attorney Timothy Weerts. Under Weerts’s cross-examination, Williams acknowledged that she’d been in involved in a third attack during her life on the rails, that one taking place in Ocala, Florida. Williams described the incident as going after a man “with a group of train-riders” and engaging in “a mass assault.”

The latest parole hearing in January was attended by Placer County Deputy District Attorney Dan Wesp, a veteran prosecutor with his agency. Wesp drove to the women’s prison in Chowchilla and again made an argument to commissioners that Williams shouldn’t be released early.

This time it fell on deaf ears.

“This parole board, like the last parole board, is very in-tune with the facts – they know she stomped on John’s head until he died,” Wesp told SN&R this week. “And they knew she had a similar assault in Kansas City that resulted in significant trauma to the victim out there. So, what this parole board really focused on were what they call the ‘dynamic factors,’ meaning what improvements she’s made and what further insights she had for the reasons she committed her life-crime … One of our biggest problems was that she advanced that parole hearing from three years, to just a year-and-a-half. And she appeared to put significant work into the things the parole board told her she needed to work on.”

Wesp says he knew that the parole board wouldn’t give much weight to the brutal facts of Williams’ murder, so he ultimately zero-ed in on another major issue with her mindset.

“It became apparent that her insight into substance abuse – alcoholism – wasn’t to the degree that you would expect to to be for someone getting paroled,” Wesp noted. “She didn’t identify herself as an addict, when it was clear that alcohol had been a big factor in both her life-crime, and her crime out in Kansas City … It also appeared to me that some of her answers were crafted to what she thought the parole board wanted to hear instead of what the actual truth might have been.”

Home invasion-murders, random racist attacks: Is a judge’s sentence now just a piece of paper?

CDCR has maintained that it has banned early parole for violent felons under Proposition 57.

But, if that’s the case, why is a potential life sentence for Williams ending five years before its minimum time requirement?

Sacramento District Attorney Thien Ho has been raising his own concerns about extremely violent offenders getting early parole from CDCR. One recent example that Ho decided to highlight involved Jeffrey Powell. Just weeks before Charity Ann Williams murdered John Alpert in Roseville, Powell – a parolee at the time – invaded the home of a Citrus Heights man in the middle of the night. After kicking the door in, Powel and another assailant stabbed the victim to death while he was sleeping in his bed. The dying man’s son and mother saw him bleed out in front of their eyes. Powell was given a nearly identical sentence to Williams – 16-years-to-life for Second Degree Murder. And, like Williams, Powell served only 10 years before being granted early parole. Powell was also an alleged leader of the violent white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood gang up until 2019, according to Sacramento County law enforcement.

Another early parole that Ho has brought to the forefront is that of Kyle Douglas Frank, who was originally sentenced to 90 years for a series of racially motived shootings in Sacramento County. Those happened in the summer of 2009. It started in August, when Frank was driving on I-80 and noticed a Black man in another vehicle glance at him. Evidence presented at trial shows that Frank screamed racial invectives at the other motorist, started chasing him on the freeway and then opened fire with a 25 caliber Beretta. A little over a week later, Frank was back on the road and menacing a Hispanic woman who was driving with her kids in a minivan. Frank ultimately fired four shots at that vehicle, too. He attacked two other motorists with his gun the following month. One was a Hispanic man who Frank fired multiple shots at. The other target was an entire Hispanic family in North Highlands, whom Frank shouted racial slurs at before opening fire. In that instance, Frank hit one of the victims in the leg.

Despite Frank’s nine-decade sentence, and despite him reportedly committing two assaults inside prison to align with a white prison gang, CDCR and the parole board granted Frank’s release after serving only 14 years.

“There is absolutely no way to predict how long people will serve, and the idea that we’re trying to predict it with any degree of accuracy is now artificial, thanks primarily to the State Legislature and to a large degree the administrators at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” said Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire. “They were emboldened by Prop. 57 – there’s a very subtle line in it that allows them to award inmate credits for anything they want. There’s currently a lawsuit pending on that … It doesn’t matter how well Charity Williams was doing in prison: She should have been expected to do that well for another five-to-seven years before she was paroled. It’s great she is doing things to prepare for her release, but what she hasn’t done is served her punishment for stomping a man to death.”

Gire added, “Her insight statement, that I read, which was submitted in the most recent hearing, it’s a two-and-a-half page binder-paper-written statement, and there are four lines dedicated to the actual crime.”

The California District Attorneys Association has been calling for greater transparency from CDCR on how it is calculating prisoners’ credits for early parole consideration. The issue grabbed the public’s attention after Sacramento gang member Smiley Martin, who was sentenced to prison for domestic violence, was granted early parole under Prop. 57 and then triggered a gunfight in the city’s Downtown that became a mass-casualty event in 2022.

“It is absolutely untrue that violent offenses aren’t being given good-time credits under Prop. 57 – they are,” Gire stressed. “The Department of Corrections has asserted in legal documents that they have the ability, and the authority, expressly under Prop. 57, to award credits for any reason they determine … It is maddening because there is a complete lack of information.”

The volunteers working at Crime Victims Assistance Network I-CAN have similar worries about how CDCR is calculating inmates’ credits. Their organization has been helping victims and survivors through the parole process since 2007. Ward that said that her team is seeing the trend of violent offenders getting early parole across the state. While acknowledging a number of major changes to California’s justice system over the last 14 years – some of which were voter-approved – Ward thinks a certain mindset within the state legislature has filtered down to the CDCR’s leadership.

“The change in philosophy was that people shouldn’t be held for long periods of time for crimes that they committed, because everyone should have an opportunity at redemption and rehabilitation,” Ward asserted. “CDCR has put an emphasis on allowing people to earn they way out of prison … There’s ‘youth parole,’ which allows individuals who have committed their crimes before the age of 26 to get an opportunity at parole earlier. And we have ‘elder parole,’ which is, if you’re over 50 and served 20 years, you get a parole hearing. The first elder parole hearing that I went and sat in on, was a San Francisco case and the inmate had been sentenced to over 400 years, but he had turned 50 and served 20, so he got a hearing; and this was an individual who committed heinous crimes against children. We now have serial rapists who are coming up under ‘youth’ and ‘elder’ parole, as well as murderers and attempted murderers.”

Ward added, “Victims are scared – and they’re shocked.”

As much as those releases may alarm the public, Williams was 27 when she stomped John Alpert to death – a year too old to qualify for the ‘youth’ parole reprieve. News & Review reached out to CDCR’s public information team and requested an interview for this story, specifically noting that we wanted to discuss how Williams’ credits were calculated, as well as why she was granted parole hearing five years before the minimum opportunity her sentencing stipulates. CDCR officials did not grant that interview request, or engage in questioning, but they did issue a statement.

“Incarcerated persons may earn credits for participating in rehabilitative programming, which by law may move their parole eligible dates: CDCR does not disclose information on credits earned while incarcerated,” wrote department public information officer Emily Humpal.

Humpal added of Williams, “The date for her subsequent hearing was advanced through the administrative review process … CDCR is committed to incentivizing incarcerated people to participate in rehabilitative programs and positive activities, and to commit to sustained good behavior.” 

After any inmate is granted parole, there’s is a process that can take up to 150 days for the release to be finalized. That window allows victims and survivors to implore Gov. Gavin Newsom to block the decision. Ward says that many survivors and family members working with her choose to raise that objection. As of press time, Charity Ann Williams – “Aggro”- was still behind the walls of Chowchilla’s prison.

Ward says she’s been to enough parole hearings to know that the elements of criminal rehabilitation, and the struggle of victims, are never black and white, though the pain is ever-present.

“In some cases, people have done a lot of work and actually made some significant changes and legitimately earn their way out of prison,” Ward acknowledged. “But there are some who I would question if they’re really rehabilitated. They’ve said all the right things. They’ve checked all the boxes … The inmates talk to each other. When someone comes out of a parole hearing, they’re more than happy to share with their buddies what they learned, and what the next person should be prepared for …. Every time a survivor goes to a parole hearing, it brings up all of these memories and all of these hurts that they live with every day but don’t focus on every day. And when you’re sitting across from the individual who caused such destruction to your life, and violently took your loved one, that’s unlike anything anyone can imagine … The survivors at these hearings are fighting for their loved ones. They feel their loved ones don’t have a voice anymore.”

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of the true crime documentary podcast series “Trace of the Devastation.”