Police Now Say Teens Harassed Migrants

San Diego police--reversing a previous finding--now say teen-agers playing war games did encounter and harass illegal migrants at the border on at least one occasion last December.

The results of the ongoing investigation were announced Tuesday when Police Chief Bob Burgreen met with representatives of the high schools the students attended in the Sweetwater Union High School District and told them that some of their students may have illegally detained undocumented migrants and confronted another undocumented group while they were dressed in camouflage clothing and carrying BB guns.

Cmdr. Larry Gore said Wednesday the Police Department will conclude its investigation within 10 days and will forward its findings to the district attorney’s office. He said the department may recommend that charges be filed against some of the youths.

The findings come two months after the Fox broadcasting program “The Reporters” aired a segment depicting teen-agers dressed in war gear and encountering people at the border. The program also showed footage of adults discussing how they accost the undocumented.

Gore said their findings also indicated that reporters on the television program gave beer to the teen-agers and encouraged them to confront undocumented people as they crossed the border. He said the teens were also given gear they were unfamiliar with, including guns that shoot paint pellets and head sets. “None of the kids could afford that stuff.”

Gore said the department may recommend that the district attorney file child endangerment charges against the producers of the program.

“It’s a real dangerous area. There have been four murders there since February,” Gore said.

The television program aired Feb. 24 and stirred controversy about the reporters’ tactics. Police officials questioned the youths involved and on March 9, police held a press conference that attacked the program’s credibility. At the time Gore called the show “well-contrived.”

But on Wednesday Gore said some of the youths approached a teacher three weeks ago and told the teacher about two incidents on Dec. 9. The teacher contacted the police, who then interviewed the teens.

Gore said the teen-agers, students from Mar Vista and Southwest high schools, had been “disturbed” by the activities of some of their friends during a Saturday outing in December to the canyons at the border area. On that day, two groups of teen-agers had gone to the border to play what Gore described as “capture-the-flag type of games.”

The teen-agers played until the afternoon, when some members of each group left. The two remaining groups then met and reformed as one group and continued their games.

Shortly afterward, the group of about 12 to 15 boys encountered two illegal migrants, Gore said.

Two members of the teen-age group “had (the) aliens put their hands on their heads, kneel on the ground and pointed their BB guns at them,” Gore said, adding that the teen-agers also patted the two men down and released them a few minutes later.

Later, the teen-agers encountered a group of about four or five people and pointed their guns at them. The BB guns, Gore said, were replicas of automatic weapons.

This second group of illegal migrants fled and one of them, a teen-age girl fell and scraped her knees, Gore said. The youths told police they administered first aid to the girl and took her to the home of a Mexican family on the U.S. side of the border. They had no other contact with illegal aliens after that, Gore said.

As they left the canyons, the youths were detained by Border Patrol agents, who turned them over to the San Diego police. The police questioned them, but none of the youths mentioned the two encounters.

Gore said no illegal migrants have come forward to discuss the two events.

Principals of the two high schools said neither school has ever condoned the war games.

It’s well known that teen-agers and adults frequent the border area to play games, said Elisabeth Cogdill, principal of Southwest High. But, she added, no one knew laws were allegedly being broken.

“If they were doing illegal things they should be held accountable for them,” Cogdill said.

But the police findings are “too little, too late,” said Herman Baca, chairman of the Committee on Chicano Rights.

The group is one of several that has called for an investigation and congressional hearings into the activities of paramilitary groups, such as the teen-agers’ border war games.

The teen-agers “are just the tip of the iceberg of violence at the border,” Baca said.