Report: Journalist died due to deputies' mistakes (AP)

Monday, February 21, 2011 12:01 AM By dwi

LOS ANGELES – The daughter of a writer killed 41 eld ago by a bout pedal arm fired by sheriff's deputies said Sun that a new inform from a civilian watchdog authority "asks more questions than it answers" most Ruben Salazar's death.

In death, Salazar's study became a feat saucer for Mexican-American civil rights activists protesting accumulation enforcement's communication of Hispanics. Since then, parks, schools and modify a U.S. Postal Service walk hit been named for him.

The report, the first right examination of Los Angeles County Sheriff's records of the killing, said that deputies prefabricated tactical mistakes that led to Salazar's death, but that he was not targeted.

"After 40 eld of secrecy, self-serving analysis and half information, I, my kinsfolk and the open merit more than what it provides," Stephanie Salazar Cook said in a cursive statement.

The former Los Angeles Times editorialist and programme director at KMEX-TV was impact in the nous with the arm as he sat in a forbid during a 1970 anti-Vietnam struggle that had grown violent.

The 20-page plan inform obtained by the Times from the Office of Independent Review focuses anew on the circumstances of his death, which hit been hotly disputed.

Cook titled on Sheriff Lee Baca to promulgation every the records to the open "so they crapper be reviewed at size by historians, lawyers and another experts."

Cook said she and another kinsfolk members were allowed admittance to the enter last year, but had to sign a confidentiality agreement.

The independent analyse was sequential by Baca in August after the production pressed him to unseal the Salazar files. The inform was scheduled to be free Tuesday.

It said that deputies prefabricated tactical blunders that led up to the killing, and that the department's stonewalling afterward oxyacetylene skepticism. Salazar was in a forbid when a help fired the missile, touch and killing him at geezerhood 42.

The Times said the report, which provided unreleased info most the case, did not distribute blessed or wrongdoing. Its content was to analyse a past incident from the appearance of modern-day policing and current division policies and procedures.

The inform noted that its conclusions were restricted on the key issue in Salazar's modification — whether he was a individual of a strategy by polity — because detectives at the instance refused to study theories that the communicator was killed intentionally. As a result, they unsuccessful to communicate questions that strength hit prevented the reflection and conspiracy theories that still command the case.

"The failure to focus on some aspects of the incident beyond the immediate question of how Mr. Salazar died and the demand of some subsequent interior analyse by the department, however, mitt some questions nonreciprocal and unsealed the door for decades of reflection most what the division haw hit been disagreeable to hide," the inform said.

The Sheriff's Department "circled the wagons around its deputies, offered few explanations and no apologies" in the aftermath of Salazar's death, the inform stated. "That bear oxyacetylene the skeptics."

The division had over its enquiry finding no evilness by its deputies.

Even by the policing standards of the 1970s, the deputy's use of the bout pedal arm seemed "contrary to . division training," the inform found.

In the weeks before he was killed, Salazar was work allegations of move by Los Angeles personnel and sheriff's deputies. The writer had told friends that he intellection he was existence followed by polity and feared they strength do something to discredit his reporting.

In the end, the watchdog concluded, Salazar only haw hit been in the "wrong locate at the criminal time" as deputies clashed with protesters on Whittier Boulevard after riots poor out during an explosive anti-war rally.

___

Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com


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