Report on Ruben Salazar’s death won’t end suspicions around the case, friends say

As officials formally released a report Tuesday on the slaying of journalist Ruben Salazar, people who knew the newsman applauded the review but said it would not end the suspicions that have clouded the case for the last 40 years.

Salazar was killed by an L.A. County Sheriff’s Department deputy who fired a tear-gas projectile into a darkened bar where Salazar was taking a break from covering a riot that had broken out in East Los Angeles, said Michael Gennaco, head of the Office of Independent Review, which prepared the report.

The watchdog office’s report, Gennaco told reporters at a packed news conference, concluded that the killing resulted from a series of tactical blunders and not an organized plot to silence Salazar.

If deputies had intended to kill Salazar, Gennaco said, “they could have chosen a strategy that had a better chance of succeeding rather than taking a blind shot in the dark.”

The watchdog agency’s review, first reported Sunday in The Times, is the first outside study of thousands of Sheriff’s Department records in the Aug. 29, 1970, slaying.

At the time of his death, Salazar was a Times columnist and news director at Spanish-language KMEX-TV. His forceful columns and aggressive TV coverage had sharply criticized law enforcement actions in Mexican American neighborhoods on Los Angeles’ Eastside.

Salazar had told friends several days before his slaying that he believed he was being followed by authorities and feared that they might do something to interfere with his reporting.

Raul Ruiz, a Cal State Northridge professor who read the report, said it won’t end the speculation that has shadowed Salazar’s slaying.

“I applaud what was done, but to really understand the situation they needed to interview more witnesses,” said Ruiz, who knew Salazar and took photographs outside the bar before the fatal tear-gas projectile was fired. “The report reflects the bias and opinion of the sheriff’s deputies.”

The report acknowledged that its conclusions were limited on the key issue in Salazar’s slaying — whether he was a victim of a plot by authorities. At the time, sheriff’s homicide detectives discounted theories that the newsman was killed intentionally. As a result, they failed to ask questions that might have prevented conspiracy theories that haunt the case to this day.

William Restrepo, a former KMEX reporter who was with Salazar when he died, had not read the report but said Tuesday that Salazar was targeted because he had become a leading voice for the growing Mexican American community caught up in the turbulence of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements.

“I still believe it was conspiracy to kill him because of the work we were doing,” Restrepo told The Times.

robert.lopez@latimes.com

robert.faturechi@latimes.com