Protest in Border Shooting Staged at Residence of D.A.

About 40 people demonstrated in front of Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller’s Mount Soledad home Wednesday night to protest Miller’s decision not to prosecute a Border Patrol agent who shot and wounded a Mexican youth in April.

Miller did not come out of his house during the peaceful, two-hour protest, which ended in a candlelight vigil at 9 p.m. A district attorney investigator stood guard in front of the house and said that Miller had left orders not to be disturbed. The investigator said that an agreement had been reached with the demonstrators in which they were allowed to protest peacefully “and express their views.”

The protest was organized by a group called the Humberto Carrillo Ad Hoc Committee, named for the 12-year-old Mexican boy who was wounded April 18 by agent Edward D. (Ned) Cole.

“We’re going to tarnish the image of Ed Miller a little bit to let him know that we will oppose his reelection in 1986,” said Juan Castellano, who helped organize the demonstration.

Humberto was shot once in the back by Cole, who fired three times through the border fence into Mexico. The incident began when Cole and other agents arrested Humberto’s brother, Eduardo, 15, who was attempting to crawl through a hole in the fence and return to Mexico after eating at a San Ysidro fast-food restaurant.

According to the Border Patrol, Humberto and other children protested Eduardo’s arrest for illegal entry and pelted the agents with rocks and bottles, thrown over the 9-foot fence. Chief Patrol Agent Alan Eliason defended Cole’s action and said Cole fired his .357 magnum pistol at Humberto because the agents feared for their lives.

Cole was exonerated after a Border Patrol investigation. Miller decided on May 1 that Cole did not violate any state laws by shooting the boy. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office said that Miller did not endorse the shooting, but at the same time Miller determined “that there is no prosecutable case.”

That decision generated waves of protest from San Diego’s Latino community. On June 8, about 300 people gathered on both sides of the border at the shooting site, about one-quarter mile east of the San Ysidro port of entry, to protest.

Marco Lopez, Humberto’s Los Angeles attorney, asked California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp to investigate the shooting, after Miller’s decision not to prosecute. Vicky Lopez, Lopez’s wife and assistant, said Wednesday that Lopez received a letter last month from Steve White, chief of the attorney general’s criminal division, explaining that the shooting is still under investigation.

According to Vicky Lopez, the letter said that an investigator hired by the attorney general’s office has interviewed two Mexican witnesses to the shooting and is attempting to locate another witness in Mexico.

A spokeswoman for White said the attorney general’s office will announce a decision later this month on whether the state will prosecute Cole.

The shooting also inspired two diplomatic notes of protest from the Mexican government to the U.S. State Department. Angry Mexican officials charged that the State Department was attempting to downplay the shooting. Agustin Gutierrez, chief spokesman for the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said: “The fact of the matter is that no American . . . has any right to fire at a Mexican citizen within Mexican territory, and this is precisely what occurred here.”

A week after the shooting, Marco Lopez filed a $3-million claim against the Immigration and Naturalization Service on behalf of Humberto.