Warren Wilson, Pioneering Los Angeles TV Reporter, Dies at 90

Warren Wilson, who in 1969 became one of the first Black television journalists hired in Los Angeles, and who used the trust he accumulated in his work to help fugitives surrender safely to the police, died on Sept. 27 in Oxnard, Calif. He was 90.

His son Stanley, a former news and documentary producer at CNN, confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility, but did not specify the cause.

Over more than 40 years as a reporter for wire services, a local radio station and the television stations KNBC and KTLA, Mr. Wilson covered the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Hillside Strangler murders and the O.J. Simpson trial.

But over more three decades, he also became involved in the lives of 22 fugitives who decided it was safer to surrender to him than to be abused, or worse, by authorities during an arrest. Their surrenders were often shown on Mr. Wilson’s TV reports.

“People knew that if Warren Wilson was involved, that there would not be an incident where a person could be mistreated,” Bernard Parks, a former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told The Los Angeles Times in 2005.

In 1988, for example, Mr. Wilson brought in a reputed gang member, Kirkton Moore, who was wanted in the slaying of a Los Angeles police officer. In 1993, he negotiated the surrender of a parolee, Keith Caldwell, who was wanted for questioning in the killings of two Compton police officers.