Santa Ana Arrest : Suspect in 1974 Chicago Police Slaying Held

A man wanted in the 1974 shotgun slaying of a Chicago police officer and the wounding of his patrol partner has been arrested in Santa Ana, police said Friday.

Hours after receiving a tip Wednesday that he was living in Santa Ana, detectives located Antonio Guillen Arias, 31, whose address they refused to release.

Arias was arrested at 1 a.m. Thursday outside a maze of apartments occupied mostly by Spanish-speaking residents in the 800 block of South Sullivan Street, Police Sgt. Collie Provence said. He said Arias, whose occupation and length of residence in California have not been determined, was booked into Orange County Jail on a no-bail murder warrant issued by Cook County, Ill., authorities.

Chicago Detective Due

Sgt. Terry Harte, commander of the Chicago Police Department’s violent crimes unit, said a detective left Friday for Santa Ana to question Arias and confirm that he is the man wanted in the death of Robert Strugala, a 29-year-old Chicago policeman who was shot to death on June 16, 1974.

Strugala’s partner, John Wasco, was shot three times in the gun battle but recovered. The officer, who is married and had a 6-year-old son at the time of the shooting, has returned to duty.

Chicago police said Friday that one suspect was captured moments after the shoot-out in a tavern. That man, Jose Guillen, 43, is believed by police to be a relative of Arias. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder, aggravated battery and armed violence and was sentenced to prison, according to newspaper accounts of the trial.

Strugala was a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam. He and his wife had one young son, and she was carrying their second child at the time of his death. He had received two awards for good police work in his 15 months as a Chicago policeman.

“Understand,” Harte said by telephone Friday, “the case is 12 years old, and the individual we have identified as a suspect used numerous aliases. So we are looking into the possibility--and I underline possibility--that this man is the one we’re looking for. But we’ve got to look at him ourselves and check things out there first.”

According to newspaper accounts at the time of the shoot-out, investigators believed it was a result of an ongoing war between Latino families in the Marquette district of Chicago, including the family that owned the Rio Grande Lounge.

First Patrol Together

In a 1984 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wasco said he and Strugala had had different partners but were on patrol together for the first time that June night--Father’s Day, 1974.

It was 9 p.m. as they sat together in a paddy wagon on 26th Street, waiting for the red light to change, Wasco said. The doors to the neighborhood bars were open.

“I was driving the wagon,” Wasco told the Tribune. “Strugala had the radio. Our windows were down, and suddenly, at the stop sign . . . Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Just like that. We heard four gunshots coming from the Rio Grande Lounge on the corner.

“He jumped out and said, ‘I’ll take the front.’ I left the wagon in the street and took the side door. I never saw Bobby again.”

As Wasco entered the tavern’s side door, he said, he saw the back of a man pointing a gun at the bartender, who had ducked as bullets were fired.

‘I Hit Him Once’

“I said, ‘Police officer. Drop your gun,’ ” Wasco recalled in the Tribune interview. “Everyone in the bar was frozen. I said it again. The man with the gun turned and aimed at me. Everyone immediately dropped to the floor. I pulled the door toward me for cover and shot from behind it. I hit him once and went down. I pushed the door open again, took one step and I heard shots from the front where my partner was. He was out of my sight. All I could see was flashes. Next thing I knew, I was feeling warm. I looked down and saw all this blood on my chest. I’d been hit three times and didn’t know it. My gun had been shot out of my hand. I went out of the door, pulled my second gun from my other holster and backed up to a doorway, waiting to see if he (one of the gunmen) was going to run out. I heard more shots from inside.”

Witnesses said that Strugala, standing in front of the tavern, began firing after Wasco was shot. They said that Strugala ducked behind the bar to reload, and a second gunman walked over and shot him and fled out the front door. The gunman in the rear, who Wasco had wounded, then struggled off the ground, ran to the front of the bar, flopped on top of it and unloaded his 38 automatic into the falling Strugala. Bleeding, the man ran out of the bar, gun still in hand, encountering police who were just pulling up. They arrested the gunman, later identified as Guillen.

A statewide alert was broadcast for the other gunman, who police believed was heading for Mexico in a white 1974 Dodge. The manhunt continued as Guillen was tried, convicted and sentenced to 50 to 100 years in prison for Strugala’s slaying and 30 to 52 years in prison for the attempted murder of Wasco.

But sometime Wednesday, Provence said, Santa Ana Officer Oliver Lofton “received information that a suspect wanted for the murder of one Chicago police officer and the wounding of a second officer in 1974 was living in Santa Ana.” Provence would not say how Lofton received that tip.

But homicide detectives located the suspect, whom they eventually identified as Arias, and booked him into jail pending a decision by Illinois authorities on extradition proceedings.

Harte said a decision on extradition won’t be made until a Chicago police detective reviews the case in Santa Ana and attempts to question Arias. He said he had not talked with Wasco personally to deliver the news of the arrest.

Wasco could not be reached for comment Friday.