Ex-Harvard Student Faces Trial : La Habra ‘Homeboy’: ‘Why’ Still Baffles

It has been more than 3 years since Jose Luis Razo crouched in a trash bin outside a La Habra dairy and made a decision that changed the course of his life.

The Harvard University freshman had just returned home from Cambridge to spend the holidays with his family. Now, the day after Christmas, he hid behind the Driftwood Dairy, down the street from the Catholic church where, as a precocious grammar school pupil, he first demonstrated the academic and athletic abilities that would take him out of the barrio.

With a .22-caliber pistol in his hand and a ski mask pulled over his face, Razo waited until there were no customers in the store, then emerged from the dumpster and robbed the elderly owner of $60.

“I was afraid he would kill,” said the robbery victim, Damnang Meas during Razo’s preliminary hearing in 1987.

It was the first of more than a dozen holdups that Razo, now 22, says he committed while home on breaks during his first 2 years at Harvard. His confession to police--and later to The Times and other newspapers--in July, 1987, shocked La Habra’s close-knit Latino community, which had been enormously proud of Razo and still expected great things to come.

This month, Razo’s trial for 10 robberies in Orange County is scheduled to get under way. His trial in Los Angeles County for three more robberies is scheduled to begin in April.

Razo’s strange saga made national news when it first came to light, and lawyers in the case expect the trial to produce the same kind of interest. Eighteen months after Razo called La Habra police and confirmed their suspicions that he was the “ski-mask bandit” who had terrorized clerks in fast-food restaurants, markets and stores, the question of why remains baffling.

Until his arrest, Razo’s life had had a storybook quality: A Mexican immigrant raised in humble surroundings, he had excelled as a student and athlete at demanding parochial schools and had taken on responsibility as a community youth leader. At the country’s most prestigious university, Razo was an above-average student and a hard-nosed, respected football player.

But there were also a few blemishes on his record. In 1983, a “theft matter” involving Razo was handled “informally” by Fullerton police, according to court documents. No further information about that incident was available.

In 1984, Razo, then 17, was made a ward of juvenile court for stealing a wallet from an unlocked car in La Habra. That same year, Razo was charged with assault and battery after he got involved in a fight at a party in Brea. Razo admitted fighting with two individuals at the party, but he said the fight started when one of them made “derogatory remarks about Mexicans,” according to court records. Brea police agreed that the incident was one of mutual combat, and the charges were eventually dropped.

And in 1986, Razo was arrested and charged with misdemeanor grand theft. The incident involved the theft of a watch and sunglasses from a student from a rival high school at a party in La Habra. That charge was dismissed the following year “in the interest of justice,” court records show.

Kept It Well-Hidden

Richard Guthrie, director of the Boys’ Club of La Habra, where Razo spent hundreds of hours as a youth, said that he and others at the club knew about the 1986 incident, but no one paid it much heed.

“He kept it very well-hidden,” Guthrie said. “It could have been a strong signal that something was amiss.”

While he was an outstanding student at Our Lady of Guadalupe School, teachers noted that Razo was sometimes unruly. His seventh-grade teacher, Rose Stalon, wrote on his report card, “Jose’s behavior in class is very disruptive.”

On a later report card, Stalon wrote that Jose’s behavior had shown “some improvement” and that he was “helpful in many ways.”

Razo’s principal at Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sister Mary Louise, now in Northern California, said that Razo was “one of the most brilliant boys” she had ever had.

‘Natural Leader’

“He was a natural leader,” she said. “He was innately very bright. . . . What Jose said, and what Jose did, others willingly followed him.”

Louise said that Razo maintained contact with her even after he went to Harvard. “He was proud that I was proud of him,” she said. “He would tell me what kind of a place it (Cambridge) was . . . about the football team. . . . He wondered if the games were televised here.”

Razo and family members declined recent requests to talk before his upcoming trial. In his statements to reporters and police in 1987, Razo said that he used the money from the robberies to help his family and friends and also to buy drugs.

“Whatever my family wanted, it got,” Razo said in a jailhouse interview in July, 1987. “I needed money for school and plane flights back and forth from Harvard.”

He also said that he didn’t fit in at Harvard and that no one there understood him.

“I am a homeboy now,” Razo said, then added in Spanish: “I don’t sell out my own ethnic identity.”

Before he dropped the case because of an unspecified conflict of interest, deputy public defender James S. Egar said the case revolved around “mental issues”--the pressures Razo felt as the symbol of success for a depressed neighborhood and the isolation he experienced as one of the few Latinos at Harvard.

‘Truth Is Confounding’

“The truth is so confounding in this case,” Egar said. “He used to tell his mom that he would buy her a house in Beverly Hills when he was a lawyer. In one day, he went from the shining star of his family to a con . . . an inmate, just another Mexican armed robber.”

Razo’s current court-appointed attorney, John D. Barnett, is less inclined to talk about the problems his client might have had bridging the distinctive worlds of Harvard and La Habra, saying only that Razo’s background “will have a place in the case.”

Barnett, in contrast with Egar, steadfastly maintains his client is innocent.

He plans to introduce evidence showing that Razo confessed to crimes he did not commit and that his statements to police were obtained by “constitutionally deficient” means, he said.

Barnett would not say why Razo would confess to robberies he did not do but said it will be “interesting” to find that out during the trial.

“People confess to crimes they don’t do all the time,” Barnett said. “The techniques and behavior of the police . . . resulted in the receipt of an unreliable series of statements.”

‘Confused, Vulnerable’

During Razo’s preliminary hearing, defense attorney Egar attacked the validity of the confession on a number of grounds. One key area was Razo’s unusual behavior while talking to the police that Egar said showed his client’s state of mind to have been “confused, vulnerable, volatile.”

When he first contacted police, Razo asked for a helicopter ride. Then, while in a police car on the way to the station, he asked if they could stop at a friend’s house to pick up “a joint.”

Later, Razo told police that “God has sent me to change this world” and other seemingly irrational statements.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans dismissed Razo’s religious statements--which included a claim that Satan was interfering with his phone calls to police--as relatively “tame” and suggested that Razo might have feigned his bizarre behavior after confessing to the robberies.

“I’m sure he’s rather brilliant,” Evans said. “It seems like he knows what he was doing.”

Municipal Judge Arthur D. Guy Jr. ruled that Razo’s statements were made voluntarily and were admissible.

The prosecutor now on the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ravi Mehta, says that he fully expects Barnett to attack the confession in every way imaginable--and then, if it is once again ruled admissible, to drop the not-guilty plea and try to negotiate a reduced sentence for Razo.

Too Much to Lose

“I don’t really expect this case to go to trial,” Mehta said. “He’s just got too much to lose.”

Barnett declined to respond directly to Mehta’s prediction that the defense will eventually plead guilty in the case in exchange for a reduced sentence.

In a case settlement discussion last March, however, Razo’s former defense attorney seemed to say essentially the same thing as Mehta. Egar told Superior Court Judge Myron Brown that if Razo’s statements to La Habra police are admitted during the trial, “the D.A. cannot lose this case.”

Egar argued that because of Razo’s exemplary background and the intense pressure he was under at Harvard, he should not serve more than 4 years in prison. Mehta termed the request “ridiculous” and instead asked for a 10-year sentence, pointing out that Razo faces a maximum prison sentence of more than 20 years for the multiple robberies if he was convicted in a trial.

Brown offered Razo a 7-year sentence, but he turned the deal down. Egar would not comment on any aspect of the case.

Razo spent a total of 16 months in Orange County Jail before friends and relatives were able to secure his release on $150,000 bail pending his two trials.

Since he got out in November, Razo has tried to reconstruct for himself some semblance of a normal life. He attended his brother’s football games at La Habra High School last fall. He works for a longtime family friend and is enrolled in courses at Fullerton College, said Boys’ Club director Guthrie.

Sobering Experience

Razo’s time in jail was a “tremendously sobering experience for him,” said Guthrie, who sat with Razo and his parents at a couple of football games. “His mental attitude is very good. He seems to be somewhat quiet, subdued, very aware of what’s going on in the world around him.

“He realizes he’s been through some rough times. . . . I think he’s hopeful that it (the trial) will come out in the best possible way for him,” Guthrie said, adding that exactly what that would be is “hard to define.”

“He wants to get it over with,” Guthrie said.

Guthrie says the Boys’ Club has made a conscious decision “not to abandon” Razo.