Theft Victim Changes His Story About Report During Razo Hearing

The preliminary hearing for a Harvard University student from La Habra who is charged with 14 armed robberies bogged down Thursday when a witness changed his testimony regarding a summary he wrote of one of the crimes.

Deputy Public Defender James S. Egar, representing Jose Luis Razo, questioned the witness for nearly an hour about a report he said he filled out following the robbery in July, 1986, of the Taco Bell restaurant in La Habra where he worked.

Both Egar and Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans said they did not know of the report until the witness, James Doyle, told about it Thursday in North Municipal Court in Fullerton.

At first, Doyle said he gave his account of the robbery to La Habra police. After a recess, however, Doyle changed his testimony and said he may have filled out the report for Taco Bell management.

Bragged of Prison Time

“I’m not certain who I gave it to,” Doyle said. He also testified that the robber bragged of having spent time in a number of prisons and threatened to kill both him and another employee if Doyle did not hand over the restaurant safe’s contents.

“He reeled off names I don’t remember, and he said he wasn’t afraid to go to prison again,” Doyle said.

Razo has no known prison record. As a sophomore psychology student at Harvard, he wrote an extensive research paper on Mexican-American prison gang behavior in California.

Egar, who moved unsuccessfully to have Doyle’s entire testimony stricken from the court record, said after the hearing that Doyle was “all over the block today. He’s a flaky witness.”

Prosecutors on Thursday were still trying to locate Doyle’s written report on the robbery.

Another prosecution witness, Carmen Rodriguez, said the masked man who robbed her at gunpoint in a Burger King restaurant last April had sandy blond or light brown eyebrows. Razo’s eyebrows are black. She also said the robber had no tattoos on his wrist.

At that point, Egar had his client’s left wrist uncuffed from his chair and held up Razo’s arm so the witness could see the tattoo he has there: VLH, for Varrio La Habra, or that city’s Latino community. It is also a gang designation, although Razo was not known to be a gang member, police said.

Evans was questioning Rodriguez a second time when Judge Arthur D. Guy Jr. called a recess until this afternoon.

After the hearing, Evans said none of his witnesses could identify Razo as the man who robbed them at gunpoint. But he said he plans to put on the stand two police officers--one from La Habra and one from Anaheim--who took Razo’s confessions to the alleged robberies, three of which occurred in Los Angeles County, last summer.

Robber Apologized

Josie Pulido, who testified about a robbery at a Thrifty Drug Store in La Habra in August, 1986, said she told the robber to “let go of me, you bastard,” when he grabbed her arm. He did, and later said, “I’m sorry I’m doing this,” Pulido said.

Razo’s parents, Jose and Guadalupe Razo, have listened for two days to detailed testimony about the robberies that their son--an outstanding student and football player at Servite High School in Anaheim, and who would have been a junior at Harvard this fall--told police and reporters he committed.

“It’s awful,” a tearful Guadalupe Razo said about her own ordeal. Thursday was her birthday, she said, adding that her son had sent her a card from jail and that she had recently spoken to him on the telephone.

“He knows that I’m upset, he tells me not to worry and that everything will be OK. ‘Trust me, trust me,’ he says.”

Asked what she thought her son meant by that, she said, “I don’t know.”