MALDEF sues sheriff over withheld Ruben Salazar files
MALDEF sues sheriff over withheld Ruben Salazar files
By Kevin Roderick | April 23, 2012 6:59 PM
Two decades before the Rodney King verdict riots, the Eastside erupted over the Vietnam War and other issues. The events of that time still echo in the city. Sheriff Lee Baca has been sued for refusing to release all of the department's files on the 1970 killing by a deputy of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar. From the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund:
MALDEF filed a petition for writ of mandate to compel Sheriff Lee Baca to release public records relating to the death of Ruben Salazar. Sheriff Baca has refused to release the complete files despite waiving exemption rights when he made the records available for public inspection in March 2011.
Salazar was a Mexican American journalist killed by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy during the national Chicano Moratorium in August 1970. The role of the County and its Sheriff’s department in the death of Salazar has been the subject of public controversy in Los Angeles, in great part as a result of the secrecy surrounding the event. MALDEF’s legal action comes as the Sheriff and County continue to withhold these records, more than forty years after the incident.
The petition was filed on behalf of noted documentary filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez. The writ of mandate seeks access to records referring to Salazar’s death and autopsy, and the ensuing investigation. The documents were initially requested by Rodriguez in 2010. Over the past two years the Sheriff’s Department has justified its refusal of full disclosure by claiming the documents were exempt from public records requests or otherwise subject to limitations on reviewing and copying. However, Baca allowed public inspection of the records – thus waiving exemption rights – then refused to provide copies of the unredacted documents he allowed to be inspected.
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2012/04/maldef_sues_sheriff_over.php#.T5bSiqCmK_U.twitter
Ruben Salazar
Rubén Salazar (March 3, 1928 – August 29, 1970)[1] was a Mexican-American journalist killed by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War on August 29, 1970 in East Los Angeles, California. During the 1970s, his killing was often cited as a symbol of unjust treatment of Chicanos by law enforcement. Salazar was the first Mexican-American journalist to cover the Chicano community from the mainstream media.[2]
Salazar was born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in 1928. He later moved across the river to El Paso, Texas. After high school, he served in the U.S. Army for two years. Salazar attended the Texas Western College, graduating in 1954 with a degree in journalism. He then obtained a job as an investigative journalist at the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post; at one point he posed as a vagrant to get arrested while he investigated the poor treatment of prisoners in the El Paso jail. After his tenure at the Herald-Post he worked at several California newspapers including the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.[2][3]
Salazar was a news reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1959 to 1970.[4] He served as a foreign correspondent in his early years at the Times, covering the 1965 United States occupation of the Dominican Republic, the Vietnam War, and the Tlatelolco massacre (the latter while serving as the Times' bureau chief in Mexico City). When he returned to the US in 1968, he focused on the Mexican-American community, writing about East Los Angeles, an area largely ignored by the media except for coverage of crimes. He became the first Chicano journalist to cover the group while working in general circulation media. Many of his pieces were critical of the Los Angeles government's treatment of Chicanos, particularly after he came into conflict with police during the East L.A. walkouts.[2]
In January 1970, Salazar left the Times to serve as the news director for the Spanish language television station KMEX in Los Angeles. At KMEX he investigated allegations of police officers planting evidence to implicate Chicanos and the July 1970 police shooting of two unarmed Mexican nationals. According to Salazar, he was visited by undercover LAPD detectives who warned him that his investigations were "dangerous in the minds of barrio people."[2] On August 29, 1970, he was covering the National Chicano Moratorium March, organized to protest the disproportionate number of Chicanos killed in the Vietnam War. The peaceful march ended with a rally that was broken up by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department using tear gas. Panic and rioting ensued, during which Salazar was shot in the head at short range with a tear gas projectile while seated in The Silver Dollar Cafe.[5] A coroner's inquest ruled the shooting a homicide, but the sheriff's deputy involved, Tom Wilson, was never prosecuted. At the time many believed the homicide was a premeditated assassination of a prominent, vocal member of the Los Angeles Chicano community.
The riot started when the owners of the Green Mill liquor store, located around the corner from the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard called in a complaint about people stealing from them. Deputies responded and a fight broke out. Later on that day cadets from the nearby Sheriff's Academy were bussed to then marched into the park. A fight ensued with the untrained cadets being beaten up. This led to more rioting. The Green Mill liquor store is still located at the same place on Whittier Boulevard. The owners later denied contacting the Sheriff's Department.
The L.A. Times columnist was resting in the Silver Dollar Bar after the Vietnam War protest became violent. According to a witness "Ruben Salazar had just sat down to sip a quiet beer at the bar, away from the madness in the street, when a deputy --ignoring the pleas of a woman outside who begged him not to shoot-- fired a tear gas projectile" at a crowd which went into the interior dimness of the bar, hitting Salazar in the head and killing him instantly. The sheriff’s deputy fired a 10-inch wall-piercing type of tear gas round (for use in barricaded situations) from a tear gas gun, rather than the type of tear gas round designed to be fired directly at people (which produces a plume of tear gas smoke). The Sheriff's deputy was found to have mistakenly loaded the wrong type of tear gas round. The 10-inch tear gas rounds of both types were identical in size and shape and a tear gas gun is extremely inaccurate beyond about twenty yards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A9n_Salazar