Law enforcement arrested over 200 people, 60 were injured, and roughly $1 million in property damage was caused at the chaotic march.[3] Three people died, including Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX news director Ruben Salazar, who was killed when Los Angeles deputy sheriffs fired tear gas projectiles into the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard. Salazar’s death, the result of overly aggressive policing, sparked widespread indignation. Although it may have gone unchallenged if not for photographic documentary evidence provided by La Raza photographer and co-editor Raul Ruiz, who, along with other photographers from the magazine, captured the incident as it unfolded.
Anger and confusion over Salazar’s death and the larger law enforcement response to the march resulted in demands for an inquest. Known as the Salazar Inquest, the sixteen day-long county-run fact-finding mission heard 61 witnesses and over 200 pieces of evidence. It produced over 2,000 pages of testimony. Local television carried its proceedings. The inquest was a “quasi-judicial proceeding” that could not impose any real legal ruling, according to Los Angeles Times journalist Paul Houston, who covered it at the time. Still, Houston wrote, due to local coverage on television and print, it was “imbued with the drama of a major event.”[4] Despite disappointment in its eventual conclusion, the inquest did produce an explanation for what had happened that August afternoon in 1970 and how Salazar died, even if the actions of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department remained questionable and motives elusive.
Though it was described as repetitive by the Los Angeles Times and others, the inquest had real moments of cinematic drama that highlighted issues relevant then and now. Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who followed the hearing through the Times, described its coverage as a ”finely detailed, non-fiction novel.”[5]
Ruiz’s own testimony remains arguably the most notable because it provided Mexican Americans with an assertive, skeptical voice in the face of attempts by law enforcement to downplay its own mistakes, and possibly, maliciousness. Another witness, Cora Barba, the 57th person to testify, captured the radicalizing nature of the protest and law enforcement’s response to it for Los Angeles’ Mexican Americans.