Trial Ordered for Ex-Harvard Student Accused of Robberies

After hearing hours of testimony and arguments during a monthlong preliminary hearing, an Orange County judge Friday ordered former Harvard University student Jose Luis Razo 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, said in closing arguments 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.”

Razo, 21, emerged from a Catholic grammar school in a La Habra barrio to excel both as a football player and student at Servite High School before going on to Harvard. The six-foot, 200-pound linebacker would have been a junior this fall, but he was arrested last July after he told police that he committed a string of armed robberies while home on school vacations since December, 1985.