Ex-Harvard Student Bound Over for Trial on Robbery Counts

After hearing hours of testimony and arguments during a monthlong preliminary hearing, a judge Friday ordered former Harvard University student Jose Luis Razo Jr. bound over for trial on 10 counts of armed robbery and one count of attempted escape.

Razo’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender James S. Egar, argued in closing that confessions his client made to police last summer--the bulk of the prosecution’s case--came while Razo was “in a confused, vulnerable, volatile mental state.”

However, North Court Municipal Judge Arthur D. Guy Jr. said: “The court finds no coercion in obtaining the confessions as well as admissions. . . . There was a clear voluntariness on the part of the defendant.”

Once it was clear that Guy was going to order Razo to stand trial, Egar requested that Razo’s bail be reduced from the current $100,000 in light of his strong community ties and his parents’ strained finances.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans, who is prosecuting the case, argued against the reduction, saying that a man “who jammed loaded .357 magnums in people’s faces” is a “danger to the community.”

He also noted that police in Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard is located, have a warrant for Razo’s arrest. Cambridge police Friday night confirmed that they have a warrant for Razo stemming from a 1986 charge of larceny over $100. No further details were available.

Guy denied the motion to reduce bail.

The Mexican-born Razo, 21, emerged from a Catholic grammar school in La Habra to excel both as a football player and student at Servite High School before going on to Harvard.

A 6-foot, 200-pound linebacker at the Ivy League school, Razo would have been a junior this fall, but he was arrested last July after he contacted police one day and told them that he had robbed a string of restaurants and markets while home on school vacations since December, 1985.

Razo contacted police last July 6 and told them that he could help them solve the murder of a 9-year-old Santa Ana girl in exchange for a ride in a police helicopter and a bag of marijuana.

La Habra Police Detectives Michael Moore and Robert Wyse met Razo at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, and he agreed to come into the police station, presumably to talk about the murder.

Once at the station, however, he blurted out to Moore--who knew that Razo had long been a suspect in the ski-mask robberies and had once watched his home with a night telescope from the bell tower of Our Lady of Guadalupe church--that he had committed several robberies.

In the course of the next two days, and after Razo waived his right to have an attorney, he confessed to having committed about 15 robberies in Los Angeles and Orange counties, plus one in Florida, that netted him $27,000. Police estimated that his take was closer to half that figure.

Razo also made a number of seemingly irrational, religious statements to investigators, and at times denied ever admitting to the robberies.

He told police that God has sent him to change the world, and he complained to one investigator that Satan had been interrupting him while trying to get through to police on the telephone.

He was eventually charged with 11 robberies in Orange County and three in Los Angeles County. One of the counts in Orange County was dropped. The attempted escape occurred while Razo was in handcuffs and ran from police who had just searched his room.

Defense attorney Egar argued Friday that the La Habra police detectives’ “unfair seduction” of Razo by engaging him in friendly conversation about Harvard and then shifting to “coercive” tactics in questioning him about the robberies “detracts from the voluntariness” of the confessions.

Prosecutor Evans argued that the detectives’ initial contact with Razo was “as conventional an encounter as could occur. . . . All the police contacts were a decent, caring kind of contact. Razo received nothing but decent, humane treatment.”

Evans cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case in which a man confessed to a murder after being ordered to either do so or else commit suicide by “a voice from God,” he told police. A state psychiatrist found the suspect to be psychotic and delusional, but the Supreme Court ruled that the confession was voluntary “absent . . . coercion on the part of the state,” Evans said.

Noting that Razo’s religious statements were relatively “tame,” Evans said that “if that’s a voluntary confession, then everything that happened in this case is a voluntary confession.”

Razo is scheduled to appear in Orange County Superior Court on Nov. 25 on the robbery and escape charges.