The Salazar inquest rumbled on for 16 days, attracting large crowds and live TV coverage from start to finish. (In a rare demonstration of non-profit unity, all seven local TV stations formed a combine of sorts, assigning the coverage on a rotating basis, so that each day's proceedings appeared on a different channel.) The L.A. Times coverage -- by Paul Houston and Dave Smith -- was so complete and often so rife with personal intensity that the collected Smith/Houston file reads like a finely-detailed non-fiction novel. Read separately, the articles are merely good journalism. But as a document, arranged chronologically, the file is more than the sum of its parts. The main theme seems to emerge almost reluctantly, as both reporters are driven to the obvious conclusion that the sheriff, along with his deputies and all his official allies, have been lying all along. This is never actually stated, but the evidence is overwhelming.

A coroner's inquest is not a trial. Its purpose is to determine the circumstances surrounding a person's death -- not who might have killed him, or why. If the circumstances indicate foul play, the next step is up to the D.A. In California a coroner's jury can reach only two possible verdicts: That the death was “accidental,” or that it was “at the hands of another.” And in the Salazar case, the sheriff and his allies needed a verdict of “accidental.” Anything else would leave the case open -- not only to the possibility of a murder or manslaughter trial for the deputy, Tom Wilson, who finally admitted firing the death weapon; but also to the threat of a million dollar negligence lawsuit against the County by Salazar's widow

The verdict finally hinged on whether or not the jury could believe Wilson's testimony that he fired into the Silver Dollar -- at the ceiling -- in order to ricochet a tear gas shell into the rear of the bar and force the armed stranger inside to come out the front door. But somehow Ruben Salazar had managed to get his head in the way of that carefully aimed shell. Wilson had never been able to figure out, he said, what went wrong.

Nor could he figure out how Raul Ruiz had managed to “doctor” those photographs that made it look like he and at least one other deputy were aiming their weapons straight into the Sivler Dollar, pointing them directly at people's heads. Ruiz had no trouble explaining it. His testimony at the inquest was no different than the story he had told me just a few days after the murder. And when the inquest was over there was nothing in the 2025 pages of testimony -- from 61 witnesses and 204 exhibits -- to cast any serious doubt on the “Chicano Eyewitness Report” that Ruiz wrote for La Raza when the sheriff was still maintaining that Salazar had been killed by “errant gunfire” during the violence at Laguna Park.