Boredom, Fake Gun Lead to Border Death

Before he was shot dead by police on a field near the international border earlier this week, Roger Varela was out of work and “bored,” a high-school dropout in a vain search for employment, his sister said.

Valera, 22, and his best friend, Scott McLintock, 19, were unhappy about living with their parents, McLintock’s father said Friday, and in recent days, “the boys” had become increasingly upset about events in the Persian Gulf.

“My son must have asked me two or three times a day, ‘Have they started the draft yet?’ ” Henry McLintock said.

They would sit for hours in front of the television, he said, riveted to stories from Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Baghdad. So, partly to relieve tension and partly to ease what he called their “incredible” boredom, they took to playing war games in a field near the border.

Whatever their state of mind, a nighttime encounter with a band of illegal immigrants--whom Varela, McLintock and a band of seven others were trying to rob, police say--led to a fatal showdown in the field near the border.

Although descriptions of the incident vary, the result was final and irreversibly tragic.

Varela was shot dead by San Diego police officers who said they thought he was aiming an M-16 rifle--it turned out to be a plastic toy replica--at them. Varela’s 17-year-old brother, Ruben, was shot in the leg in the incident.

The dead man’s sister, Tamara Varela, said Friday that the shooting may have followed a misidentification: Ruben Varela told her the youths thought that the police officers were themselves robbers.

Police say that Roger Varela and McLintock were actually part of a robbery ring that preyed on illegal aliens, and that immigrants they were trying to rob are prepared to testify in court.

Tamara Varela did not dispute the police description of her brother and his friends as robbers: “Well, yeah, they might have done it before.”

McLintock and Tony Lee Lanham, 19, pleaded not guilty in Municipal Court Friday on one count each of conspiracy to commit robbery, said Victor Nunez, the deputy San Diego County district attorney who is handling the case. Each was being held in lieu of $250,000 bail. Both could be sentenced to up to five years in jail if convicted, the prosecutor said.

Six other youths, ranging in age from 15 to 17, are being held in Juvenile Hall.

Tamara Varela, 19, said Friday from her parent’s home in Imperial Beach that her younger brother had told her “all about what happened out there” around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday in a brush-covered ravine a quarter of a mile southwest of Dairy Mart and Servando roads.

“He told my mom that they were standing around, and all of a sudden these people jumped out of the bushes,” she said. “Ruben thought they were bandits. He said my brother, Roger, had a gun--a plastic gun that looked like an M-16--but that he never pointed it at the cops, like they said he did. He just held it by his side.

“But Ruben said they pointed their guns at Roger and shot him--several times. After they stopped firing, Ruben said they told them to drop their weapons, but Roger was the only one who had a weapon, and, even then, it was just this little toy gun he had been playing with,” Tamara Varela said.

“Ruben said a little bit later he asked the police, ‘How’s my brother,’ and the officer said, ‘Are you happy now? Your brother’s a stiff.’ ”

Varela said her mother saw her son being loaded into an ambulance on the 11 o’clock news later that night.

“She could tell it was him, and she called the police, hospitals, everybody, but nobody would say anything,” Tamara Varela said.

She said that her mother wasn’t notified of her son’s death until Thursday morning, and that Ruben was not permitted to phone home to report what had happened.

The police account differs. Immigrants who were being robbed have corroborated police accounts that they were set upon by the youths, Lt. Dan Berglund of the San Diego Police Department said Friday.

A preliminary investigation indicated that the shootings were justified, Berglund said, although the district attorney’s office and police are reviewing the case, which is standard procedure. Both officers have been placed on administrative leave, also standard procedure.

The officers say they opened fire based on a threat against their lives, in accordance with police guidelines. Police say the officers fired only after identifying themselves as lawmen, both in English and Spanish.

The officers who fired were identified as Sgt. Robert Kanaski, 34, an 11-year police veteran, and Jaime Conti, 30, who has six years on the force. They fired a total of eight shots from their 9-millimeter, semi-automatic service weapons, striking Roger Varela five times and hitting his younger brother once.

Both officers were assigned to the Border Crime Intervention Unit, a uniformed squad that patrols the border strip where undocumented border-crossers have long been victimized by thieves. On the night of the shooting, police say, 10 officers were assigned to the border anti-crime squad.

Police say all of the suspects appeared to be part of a group of U.S. residents who robbed illegal immigrants along the border strip in San Diego. Police said members of the group appeared to have participated in previous border-area attacks, but declined to release additional details.

“I’m sure this is not the first time they’ve done this,” Lt. Berglund said.

Berglund would not say whether it appeared the group was well-organized or not. He said police are investigating whether any of the suspects in this case were linked to a group known as the Metal Militia, a teen-age paramilitary group that “patrolled” the border strip before its activities became known last year when sensational videotape of its activities was aired in a national television program. The group was subsequently disbanded.

Nunez, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case, said evidence to date indicates there was no reason to believe that these alleged robbers were connected with that group. Neither of the adult suspects has a known criminal record, Nunez said.

On the night of the robbery, Berglund said, the two officers were following a group of about eight illegal immigrants as they made their way north through the rugged terrain, about half a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Berglund said the two officers watched as a group of nine young men emerged from behind a sand dune and falsely identified themselves to the immigrants as police officers.

“They ordered the people to get down, and they started punching them and hitting them,” Berglund said.

At that point, Berglund said, the two officers identified themselves as police officers in both English and Spanish. Roger Varela, apparently not recognizing that he was facing authentic lawmen, raised his replica rifle to his shoulders, prompting the two officers to open fire, according to the police account.

“I could only surmise that he didn’t believe that these were police officers,” Berglund said of Roger Varela.

The police lieutenant noted that many border-area thieves falsely identify themselves as lawmen in an effort to intimidate potential victims. It was dark at the time of the shooting, and there was a lot of shouting going on, he said.

Most thieves who prowl the border area are believed to be Tijuana residents. However, Wednesday’s shooting is the second case within the past six months involving alleged attacks against immigrants by U.S. residents.

Last summer, police arrested four San Diego-area residents and charged them with robbery in connection with a number of unrelated attacks against immigrants in the border strip. Among them was Jason Joel MacAllister, a war-games enthusiast who once headed the Metal Militia teen-age paramilitary group. MacAllister and three co-defendants pleaded guilty to robbery charges in that case last week.

Both officers who fired Wednesday were assigned to the Border Crime Intervention Unit, a special squad that police established in mid-1989. The outfit is the successor of a joint police-U.S. Border Patrol squad that was assigned to the border strip between January, 1984, and January, 1989.

That city-federal team shot 44 suspects during its five-year life, killing 18, before it was disbanded after allegations that lawmen wrongly killed two Mexican men. Many of the dead suspects in those shootings were brandishing toy or replica weapons, according to police accounts. Authorities ruled that all of the shootings involving the unit were justified.

Both Tamara Varela and Henry McLintock said that Roger Varela, Scott McLintock and the seven other suspects were not part of the Metal Militia or any similar group, a charge McLintock labeled as “ridiculous.” He said “the boys” had only been going to the field since Monday night and were doing so “out of boredom . . . sheer frustration.”

He said his son and Varela were “not trying to rob anyone.”

Tamara Varela seemed less certain.

“The guys were broke, and they hadn’t been too happy lately. They were probably just playing around. I don’t know why they were trying to rob them. I don’t know. They built a bonfire, though, and I don’t know why they’d do that if they meant to rob someone.”

Whatever they were up to, the elder McLintock is outraged at police, who he believes were “trigger-happy” in taking the life of “an innocent boy.” He said that neither Varela nor his son had ever been in trouble before, “and I just can’t believe one of ‘em’s dead .”

McLintock said that, when jobs were available, his son, who had dropped out of Palomar High School in Chula Vista in 1990, worked on a construction crew. Varela was an unemployed welder who dropped out of Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach in 1986, according to his sister.

“We honestly felt they weren’t doing anything wrong,” McLintock said about the shootings. “I was just worried that maybe they could get hurt one night . . . and they did.”