31-year-old Stevie R. “Bubba” Walder (MySpace) has been arrested for the alleged murder of 50-year-old Naushad Virani this past Friday night.
The racist from Liberty County, Texas has been identified from surveillance video as the man who allegedly walked into the Ridgewood Grocery on state road 146 on Christmas to rob the place and during the course of the robbery attempt shot the store’s owner, Virani. A customer found the body of Virani around 10 p.m. Friday and called police.
Bubba, who reportedly has a long rap sheet in Liberty County, is believed to be a member of a white supremacist group in the area. It also appears that someone has been trying a weird sort of damage control on his MySpace page. I found the page last night before I went to bed and therefore already had the three images above open in tabs to download this morning and the number of photos online has dwindled to just a few. The 3rd photo above with the big “SS” on his neck in particular has been deleted. There is nothing else particularly incriminating on his page which says that he lives in Hull, TX with his wife and their 1 & 1/2 year old son. He lists under his “Who I’d Like to Meet” his daughter Alexis Diane Crocker/Walder. Last night it showed his last login as 11/7/2009 as shown in the screencap below. It is still showing the same date this morning but the photo is gone. Does MySpace allow you to edit photos via cell phone? Apparently it might since it is now gone.
Liberty County is allegedly an area where racism and white supremacy are fairly strong. The dragging death of James Byrd, Jr happened in nearby Vidor in Orange County. Both are near Beaumont, Texas, fairly close to the Louisiana border.
What I found really sad is that the only reason Virani, the owner of the store, was working was so that his employees could have Christmas off to be with their families.
Walder was picked up on Highway 69 north of Woodville early Sunday morning during a routine traffic stop and has been lodged in the Liberty County Jail on $2 million bond. He allegedly admitted to the murder to a deputy and told them that he decided to give up and not shoot at police because they were white. According to the local Sheriff Walden told the deputy, “‘I saw you behind me. I loaded my clip. When I saw that all of you were white I decided to give up and not fight.“
Although he gave up without a fight Walder is apparently causing some sort of problems for the jailers in the county jail.
