CONTRAST IN LIFE STYLES: FROM LA HABRA TO HARVARD : Worlds Away at Harvard, the Razo Tale Is Hard to Figure

Kirkland House sits in a quiet corner of the Harvard University campus, a block from the Charles River and across from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government. It is built around a shady quadrangle from which white archways open onto smoothed stone stairwells that, even in muggy Boston summers, echo loudly as students tromp off to class.

It is unmistakeably Ivy League, but it is also known around Harvard as a “jock dorm.”

There, in room H-23, sophomore Jose Luis Razo Jr. led a public life that impressed most everyone with his social, academic and athletic abilities, while hiding another life that has left those who knew him best hurt and confused.

Knew He Was Homesick

His Harvard roommates knew that Razo, the son of Mexican parents and a star football player and student at Catholic Servite High School in Anaheim, was homesick. They knew, too, that “home for Joe was so much different than it was for us,” said Neil Phillips, a basketball and football player who shared a room with Razo in the two-bedroom, four-man suite.

“Even when he told us things about home, there are things we just couldn’t be in touch with.”

But they had no clue that since Christmas break of his freshman year, Razo has grabbed a gun and held up stores and restaurants when he went home to La Habra--as police allege and as Razo says he did--almost as routinely as he went for his five-mile runs through Cambridge.

“I wish it was something that had just started this summer,” said Phillips, an English major from Germantown, Md. “The fact that it’s gone on for so long makes me think that there’s so much more we didn’t know.”

Razo, arrested last week on suspicion of robberies in La Habra, Costa Mesa, Whittier and one in Miami, Fla., is being held at the Orange County Jail. He said in an interview there that he figures he netted about $30,000 in the robberies, although police say the amount could be far less.

Another Harvard roommate, Mike Gielen, said the friendly but quiet Razo became more withdrawn as their sophomore year wore on and talked often of transferring. He got an application for Stanford University, but he never applied.

“Everyone has a hard time adjusting their first year,” said Gielen, of Bowie, Md. “But Joe always talked about home--about how much he liked L.A. and how he didn’t fit in here.”

Proud of Their Origins

Phillips, a black who was born in Jamaica, said that he and Razo were proud of their origins. But, he said, it was possible that the transition for Razo, for whom family and friends 3,000 miles away seemed all important, was harder than for himself.

“It wasn’t that different for me,” Phillips said. “When I go home, things are pretty much the same. . . . I’ve got friends who go to Brown (University), other colleges. . . . But for Joe, it was worlds different.”

In the fall of ‘86, only 4% of Harvard’s 6,620 undergraduates were Latino, many of those Puerto Rican. Six percent were black and 9% Asian.

Razo wore what his roommates dubbed “Razo wear”--a Los Angeles Raiders cap, often tugged on backwards, a T-shirt and black sweat pants. “He loved to wear black,” Phillips said.

But Dino Arapero, an 18-year-old grocery clerk who had grown up with Razo on South Marian Street, said that Razo was angered by the ribbing he got at Harvard about being Mexican-American. In that world, he dressed to flaunt his ethnicity, Arapero said, to show “Joe’s not just a Mexican--he’s a home boy. He’d walk around campus wearing baggy Levi’s, a white shirt and bandanna. They’d just tease him more.”

A psychology major on a scholarship, Razo worked especially hard on a term paper last spring on Chicano gangs and the penal system, Phillips said. He was, Gielen said, “the best student in our room.”

Razo often would stay in the room and watch television or sit at his Macintosh computer rather than join his roommates when they went to a party or a local bar, said Gielen.

“He wasn’t a partyer,” he said. “But he was one of the nicest guys just to hang out with.”

Razo almost always ate in the Kirkland House cafeteria--sparingly, Gielen said, “because he thought he was fat.” Neither Gielen nor Phillips had any idea what Razo might have done with the money he says he stole.

He borrowed and repaid money from his roommates to buy the computer, had an old stereo and didn’t use drugs, Phillips.

Talked of Moving

Razo talked of moving from Kirkland House to Quincy House, a quieter dormitory, but he never did, Gielen said.

During his freshman year, Razo lived alone in Canaday Hall in Harvard Yard. His resident adviser that year, doctoral student Virginia Mackay-Smith, said he was a “nice kid--a nice person to have in the hall--and other kids liked him.”

His adviser last year, economics Ph.D. candidate Mike Hemesath, said that Razo came to him with a problem but that he was “very pleasant . . . he would always stop and take the time to talk.”

University officials, including his football coaches, said they could not comment because of confidentiality laws.

Other players on the football team said they saw little sign of Razo’s unhappiness.

Kevin Dulsky, a senior from Woodland Hills voted captain of the team for the coming year, said he and Razo “kind of hit it off” early in Razo’s freshman year because both were from California.

“He’s a tough kid,” Dulsky said, adding that Razo also was “socially adept. Everyone really liked him; I always had a good time with him.”

Senior linebacker Richard Mau said he was startled to see a tattoo on Razo’s back--”on a Harvard student? That would startle anyone,” he said--but otherwise he thought Razo was a normal kid.

Razo was a hard-working, quick linebacker who also possessed a tremendous punting foot and eventually could have been the team’s first-string punter.

“All this hasn’t really hit me yet,” said Phillips, who is spending the summer on Nantucket Island doing construction work. “But I know it will in the fall, when I go back to school and Joe’s not there.”