Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (11 page)

The history of Chicano complaints against cops in East L.A. is not a happy one. “The cops never lose,” Acosta told me, “and they won’t lose this one either. They just murdered the only guy in the community they were really afraid of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter.”

I could accept that. But it was difficult, even for me, to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it ... because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.

As for Acosta’s charge of murder, I knew him well enough to understand how he could make that charge
publicly
... I also knew him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t try to hang that kind of monstrous bullshit on me. So our phone talk naturally disturbed me ... and I fell to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had told me the truth.

On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case—either pro or con—from my bundle of notes and newsclips relating to Salazar’s death. By that time at least six reportedly reliable witnesses had made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial points, with the original police version—which nobody believed anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff’s account of that accident; it wasn’t even a good
lie
.

Within hours after the
Times
hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops—rather than street snipers—the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on “known dissidents” who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, “thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions.”

Meanwhile, evidence was building up that Ruben Salazar had been murdered—either deliberately or for no reason at all. The most damaging anti-cop testimony thus far had come from Guillermo Restrepo, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter and newscaster for KMEX-TV, who was covering the “riot” with Salazar that afternoon, and who had gone with him into the Silver Dollar Cafe “to take a leak and drink a quick beer before we went back to the station to put the story together.” Restrepo’s testimony was solid enough on its own to cast a filthy shadow on the original police version, but when he produced two
more
eyewitnesses who told exactly the same story, the sheriff abandoned all hope and sent his scriptwriters back to the sty.

Guillermo Restrepo is well known in East L.A.—a familiar figure to every Chicano who owns a TV set. Restrepo is the out-front public face of KMEX-TV news ... and Ruben Salazar, until August 29, 1970, was the man behind the news—the editor.

They worked well together, and on that Saturday when the Chicano “peace rally” turned into a Watts-style street riot, both Salazar and Restrepo decided that it might be wise if Restrepo—a native Colombian—brought two of his friends (also Colombians) to help out as spotters and de facto bodyguards.

Their names were Gustavo Garcia, age thirty, and Hector Fabio Franco, also thirty. Both men appear in a photograph (taken seconds before Salazar was killed) of a sheriff’s deputy pointing a shotgun at the front door of the Silver Dollar Cafe. Garcia is the man right in front of the gun. When the picture was taken, he had just asked the cop what was going on, and the cop had just told him to get back inside the bar if he didn’t want to be shot.

The sheriff’s office was not aware of this photo until three days after it was taken—along with a dozen others—by two
more
eyewitnesses, who also happened to be editors of
La Raza
, a militant Chicano newspaper that calls itself “the voice of the East L.A. barrio.”

The photographs were taken by Raul Ruiz, a twenty-eight-year-old teacher of Latin American studies at San Fernando Valley State College. Ruiz was on assignment for
La Raza
that day when the rally turned into a street war with the police. He and Joe Razo—a thirty-three-year-old law student with an MA in psychology—were following the action along Whittier Boulevard when they noticed a task force of sheriff’s deputies preparing to assault the Silver Dollar Cafe.

Their accounts of what happened there—along with Ruiz’s photos—were published in
La Raza
three days after the sheriff’s office said Salazar had been killed a mile away in Laguna Park, by snipers and/or “errant gunfire.”

The
La Raza
spread was a bombshell. The photos weren’t much individually, but together—along with the Ruiz-Razo testimony—they showed that the cops were still lying when they came up with their second (revised) version of the Salazar killing.

It also verified the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony, which had already shot down the original police version by establishing, beyond any doubt, that Ruben Salazar had been killed, by a deputy sheriff, in the Silver Dollar Cafe. They were certain of
that
, but no more. They were puzzled, they said, when the cops appeared with guns and began threatening them. But they decided to leave anyway—by the back door, since the cops wouldn’t let anybody out of the front—and that was when the shooting started, less than thirty seconds after Garcia was photographed in front of that shotgun barrel on the sidewalk.

The weakness in the Restrepo-Garcia-Franco testimony was so obvious that not even the cops could miss it. They knew nothing beyond what had happened
inside
the Silver Dollar at the time of Salazar’s death. There was no way they could have known what was happening
outside
, or
why
the cops started shooting.

The explanation came almost instantly from the sheriff’s office—once again from Lt. Hamilton. The police had received an “anonymous report,” he said, that “a man with a gun” was inside the Silver Dollar
Cafe. This was the extent of their “probable cause,” their reason for doing what they did. These actions, according to Hamilton, consisted of “sending several deputies” to deal with the problem ... and they did so by stationing themselves in front of the Silver Dollar and issuing “a loud warning” with a bullhorn calling all those inside to come outside with their hands above their heads.

There was no response, Hamilton said, so a deputy then fired two tear gas projectiles into the bar through the front door. At this point two men and a woman fled out the back, and one of the men was relieved by waiting deputies of a 7.65 caliber pistol. He was not arrested—not even detained—and at that point a deputy fired two more tear gas projectiles through the front door of the place.

Again there was no response, and after a fifteen-minute wait one of the braver deputies crept up and skillfully slammed the front door—
without entering
, Hamilton added. The only person who actually entered the bar, according to the police version, was the owner, Pete Hernandez, who showed up about half an hour after the shooting and asked if he could go inside and get his rifle.

Why not? said the cops, so Hernandez went in the
back door
and got his rifle out of the rear storeroom—about fifty feet away from where Ruben Salazar’s body lay in a fog of rancid CS gas.

Then, for the next two hours, some two dozen sheriff’s deputies cordoned off the street in front of the Silver Dollar’s front door. This naturally attracted a crowd of curious Chicanos, not all of them friendly—and one, an eighteen-year-old girl, was shot in the leg with the same kind of tear gas bazooka that had blown Ruben Salazar’s head apart.

The Salazar inquest rumbled on for sixteen days, attracting large crowds and live TV coverage from start to finish. (In a rare demonstration of nonprofit unity, all seven local TV stations formed a combine of sorts, assigning the coverage on a rotating basis, so that each day’s proceedings appeared on a different channel.) The
L.A. Times
coverage—by Paul Houston and Dave Smith—was so complete and often so rife with personal intensity that the collected Smith-Houston file reads like a finely detailed nonfiction novel. Read separately, the articles are merely good
journalism. But as a document, arranged chronologically, the file is more than the sum of its parts. The main theme seems to emerge almost reluctantly, as both reporters are driven to the obvious conclusion that the sheriff, along with his deputies and all his official allies, have been
lying
all along. This is never actually stated, but the evidence is overwhelming.

A coroner’s inquest is not a trial. Its purpose is to determine the circumstances surrounding a person’s death—not who might have killed him, or why. If the circumstances indicate foul play, the next step is up to the DA. In California a coroner’s jury can reach only two possible verdicts: that the death was “accidental,” or that it was “at the hands of another.” And in the Salazar case, the sheriff and his allies
needed
a verdict of “accidental.” Anything else would leave the case open—not only to the possibility of a murder or manslaughter trial for the deputy, Tom Wilson, who finally admitted firing the death weapon; but also to the threat of a $1 million negligence lawsuit against the County by Salazar’s widow.

The verdict finally hinged on whether or not the jury could believe Wilson’s testimony that he fired into the Silver Dollar—at the
ceiling
—in order to ricochet a tear gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to come out the front door. But somehow Ruben Salazar had managed to get his head in the way of that carefully aimed shell. Wilson had never been able to figure out, he said, what went wrong.

Nor could he figure out how Raul Ruiz had managed to “doctor” those photographs that made it look like he and at least one other deputy were aiming their weapons straight into the Silver Dollar, pointing them directly at people’s heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His testimony at the inquest was no different than the story he had told me just a few days after the murder. And when the inquest was over, there was nothing in the 2,025 pages of testimony—from 61 witnesses and 204 exhibits—to cast any serious doubt on the “Chicano Eyewitness Report” that Ruiz wrote for
La Raza
when the sheriff was still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by “errant gunfire” during the violence at Laguna Park.