In Their Own Words: Director and Producer Pj Perez

I don’t remember the first time I met Lin “Spit” Newborn. I know that it was at the Torrey Pines Discount Cinema, home in the early 1990s to Friday and Saturday midnight screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Spit was just one of the dozens of regular “freaks” who came to “watch” Rocky every weekend. Back then, the Rocky Horror live cast and audience represented the core of the Las Vegas’s underground scene – it was a gateway for the uninitiated into a world of sexual deviation, drug experimentation and cultural saturation. Newborn stood out from the mostly white, unimposing Goth kids and punk rockers. In another reality, Spit might have been a pro basketball player – he was well over six feet, black, and strong. He had multiple piercings, alternately a shaved head or a Mohawk, and could be disturbingly quiet or disarmingly loud.

Lin “Spit” Newborn strikes a familiar pose. Photo by the author.

Spit didn’t hang around Rocky too often when I was there. He was a close friend with Brandon Sledge – he went by “Spider” at the time – who used to play the character Riff Raff in the Rocky live cast. Usually where one could be found, so could the other – they were at times both roommates and bandmates. By hanging around long enough, one would get to know who Spit was, if not actually through formal introduction. As a matter of fact, formal introduction was rarely practiced back in those days. Usually, a person’s reputation would precede them, making everyone essentially “known” to each other before ever meeting face-to-face. It was a sometimes discomforting openness between somewhat connected people.

Skinhead activity in Las Vegas was pretty common in the early-to-mid ‘90s, violent racist skins making their presence known mostly at punk shows. In response to the neo-Nazi sentiment, local anti-racist skins – most self-proclaimed S.H.A.R.P.s (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) – banded together to oppose racist skinhead violence. Spit was also a member of a group called A.R.M. (Anti-Racist Movement) with some future members of the Las Vegas chapter of A.R.A. (Anti-Racist Action). In almost every instance of racist skinhead violence, S.H.A.R.P.s were there to fight them.

In the mid ’90s, Spit and Brandon formed a band with some friends called Life of Lies. The band didn’t really play music as much as make a statement with noise. I only got the chance to see Life of Lies play once, but it was probably the defining moment of the short-lived band.

The Huntridge Theatre used to host local band nights in the middle of the week, which usually amounted to little more than on-stage practice sessions for those young bands. It must have been a Tuesday or Wednesday night when Spit and his hodge-podge band played to a crowd of about thirty or forty people. There was a five-dollar cover charge on local band nights, but most of us who were there just came in with somebody who knew somebody else at the Huntridge.

After some presumably local punk band finished their set, Life of Lies took to the stage. Spit half-yelled, half-sung poetry or lyrics that were partially read from either a notebook or loose pieces of paper. What Life of Lies’ message was supposed to be, I couldn’t always tell. But what I am sure of is that Spit was trying to make some sort of statement when he picked up a television the band had brought and smashed it down on the Huntridge’s stage.

It was bold, it was chaotic, it was planned spontaneity. It also got Spit and his band ejected from the Huntridge Theatre. Management pulled the plug on Life of Lies, and they definitely were not invited back.

Somewhere along the way, Life of Lies broke up. A few years later, Spit was still fighting against racism – and taking on a new role as a father, to a baby boy name Nicodemus. Everything came to a devastating end in the early hours of July 4, 1998 when Spit and his fellow S.H.A.R.P. Dan Shersty were murdered, execution-style, by neo-Nazis in the desert outside Las Vegas.

The ‘90s underground scene had seen its share of death and violence throughout the decade – from poet John Emmons’ shooting to Ginger Rio’s kidnapping and subsequent murder – but the brutal slaying of these two young men who dedicated their lives to ending racist violence hit everybody close to home. Spit and Daniel were casualties in a war – an ongoing battle for unity and freedom.

As someone who not only knew Spit but who dedicated his life and career to documenting the “underground” cultural milieu of Las Vegas in the media, this story always stuck with me. On the fifth anniversary of their murders, I wrote a memorial that was published in the weekly newspaper Las Vegas CityLife (from which some of this blog post has been adapted). I expanded that into a chapter of a book I was working on at the time about the 1990s alternative culture scene in Vegas, a book that never materialized, but most of which later became the basis for my first documentary, Parkway of Broken Dreams. Even when I was starting work on that film, however, I was already pitching the concept of a documentary film or series on Spit and Dan’s murders.

I didn’t take on Murdered on the Fourth of July because I wanted to. Or because it would be fun. I’m making this film because someone has to. Someone has to make sense of the senseless thing that happened, put it in context, and try to find some lesson here – and maybe some semblance of closure for those who were most immediately impacted by the loss of these two young men and the violence perpetrated by white supremacists.

Learn more about our entire filmmaking team or how you can contribute to the production of Murdered on the Fourth of July.