Story highlights Zackary Randalls was shot dead Tuesday in what police are calling a hate crime

"He wouldn't want this to turn into any type of hateful reaction from anybody in the public," his longtime best friend said

(CNN) Zackary Randalls' kids will know their father. That is the promise that Eddie Valencia is making to his best friend of 15 years, one of three white men shot dead Tuesday in Fresno, California, in what police are calling a hate crime.

"We all have a different piece of him, a different relationship, and knew him at different times of his life," Valencia said, overcome with grief and barely able to speak. "They will know their father," he said of Randalls' 3-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.

Valencia said he was the one to tell Randalls' wife that her husband had died after he heard about it on social media.

"He would do the same thing for me," he told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday, just one day after his friend's death.

Wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap in honor of Randalls, a longtime Dodgers fan, Valencia described his friend as "the best," a man who "loved his two kids with everything that he had."

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