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.