Confession a Key Issue as Ex-Harvard Student Is Tried for Robberies

It has been more than three 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 two 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 had expected great things of him.

On Wednesday, Razo’s trial for 10 robberies he says he committed in Orange County began in a Santa Ana courtroom as his lawyer and a county prosecutor began in pretrial motions to argue over what is shaping up as the key element in the case--the admissibility of Razo’s confession as evidence. Jury selection in the case is expected to follow in a week or so, and Razo’s trial in Los Angeles County for three more robberies and five assaults is scheduled for May 31.

But 18 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 taken on responsibility as a community youth leader. At Harvard, Razo was an above-average student and a hard-nosed, respected football player.

What few people knew then was that 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, he was charged with assault and battery after he got involved in a fight at a party in Brea, but the charges were later 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.

Richard Guthrie, director of the Boys’ Club of La Habra, where Razo spent many 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.”

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, Orange County 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.

Razo’s current court-appointed attorney in the Orange County case, 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 that 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.

During Razo’s preliminary hearing, defense attorney Egar attacked the validity of the confession on a number of grounds, contending, for example, that Razo’s unusual behavior while talking to the police showed that his state of mind was “confused, vulnerable, volatile.”

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

The prosecutor now on the Orange County case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ravi Mehta, says he 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.

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

Because he is also charged with five counts of assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles County, Razo could face a sentence of as long as 20 years there as well, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Millet said.

In Los Angeles County, he is charged with robbing a pizza parlor in Whittier on two occasions and a McDonald’s restaurant in Pico Rivera. During the second pizza parlor robbery, on Jan. 12, 1987, Razo did something he had not done in any of the other incidents--he failed to cover his face with a ski mask or scarf, wearing only a baseball cap on his head, police said.

That robbery is the only one in which Razo was positively identified by a store or restaurant employee.

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

Since he got out, Razo has tried to reconstruct 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, Boys’ Club director Guthrie said.

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.