Meanwhile, evidence was building up that Ruben Salazar had been murdered -- either deliberately or for no reason at all. The most damaging anti-cop testimony thus far had come from Guillermo Restrepo, a 28-year-old reporter and newscaster for KMEX-TV, who was covering the “riot” with Salazar that afternoon, and who had gone with him into the Silver Dollar Cafe “to take a leak and drink a quick beer before we went back to the station to put the story together.” Restrepo's testimony was solid enough on its own to cast a filthy shadow on the original police version, but when he produced two more eyewitnesses who told exactly the same story, the sheriff abandoned all hope and sent his scriptwriters back to the sty.

Guillermo Restrepo is well known in East L.A. -- a familiar figure to every Chicano who owns a TV set, Restrepo is the out-front public face of KMEX-TV news. . . and Ruben Salazar, until August 19, 1970, was the man behind the news -- the editor.

They worked well together, and on that Saturday when the Chicano “peace rally” turned into a Watts-style street riot, both Salazar and Restrepo decided that it might be wise if Restrepo -- a native Colombian -- brought two of his friends (also Colombians) to help out as spotters and de facto bodyguards.

Their names were Gustavo Garcia, age 30, and Hector Fabio Franco, also 30. Both men appear in a photograph (taken seconds before Salazar was killed) of a sheriff's deputy pointing a shotgun at the front door of the Silver Dollar Cafe. Garcia is the man right in front of the gun. When the picture was taken he had just asked the cop what was going on, and the cop had just told him to get back inside the bar if he didn't want to be shot.

The sheriff's office was not aware of this photo until three days after it was taken -- along with a dozen others -- by two more eyewitnesses, who also happened to be editors of La Raza, a militant Chicano newspaper that calls itself “the voice of the East L.A. barrio.” (Actually, it is one of several: The Brown Berets publish a monthly tabloid called La Causa. The National La Raza Law Students' Association has its own monthly -- Justicia O! The Socialist Workers Party covers the barrio with The Militant and the East L.A. Welfare Rights Organization has its own tabloid -- La Causa de los Pobres. There is also Con Safos -- a quarterly review of Chicano Art and Literature.)

The photographs were taken by Raul Ruiz, a 28-year-old teacher of Latin American studies at San Fernando Valley State College. Ruiz was on assignment for La Raza that day when the rally turned into a street war with police. He and Joe Razo -- a 33-year-old law student with an M.A. in psychology -- were following the action along Whittier Boulevard when they noticed a task force of sheriff's deputies preparing to assault the Silver Dollar Cafe.