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.