Ruben Salazar and the Silver Dollar Cafe

On the morning of August twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy, twenty-five thousand people assembled at Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles and began to march. The National Chicano Moratorium Committee had organized the largest anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Mexican American history. The marchers carried signs. They were protesting a war that was killing Chicano soldiers at approximately double their share of the general population. The march proceeded peacefully.

Ruben Salazar was working that day. He was the Los Angeles Times's first Mexican American staff reporter, and a television columnist for KMEX-TV. He had covered the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. He had come home to cover the Chicano community in Los Angeles, writing columns that documented how the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department treated Brown residents, and reporting on the disproportionate toll the war was taking on Chicano families. He was forty-two years old.

When Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies moved on the crowd that afternoon, in response to a reported disturbance at a liquor store on Whittier Boulevard, Salazar stepped into the Silver Dollar Cafe at four nine four five Whittier Boulevard to wait. A deputy named Tom Wilson fired a ten-inch tear-gas projectile through the closed door of the cafe. The projectile struck Ruben Salazar in the head.

A coroner's inquest ruled his death accidental on a four-to-three vote. No criminal charges were filed. Deputy Wilson continued his career with the Sheriff's Department.

Two other people died that day during the confrontation. Salazar is the only journalist documented to have been killed by American law enforcement during a domestic civil rights demonstration whose death has gone without criminal resolution. Whether he was deliberately targeted has never been formally established. That is where the record stops.