They Were Friends

Robert Duron has been dead for two weeks now, and the emotional trauma that flashed through Montebello like summer lightning has diminished. But one man won’t give up until Duron’s killer is caught.

This column is as much about friendship as it is about the murder of a good man. It’s about the bond forged between Duron and Ivan Harvey, and the power of camaraderie that survives death.

Harvey has sworn to see his friend’s killer in hell and to tell the world about the qualities of the man shot down after an argument over a dog.

Duron, 42, was the kind of guy every neighborhood ought to have. A Vietnam veteran who volunteered for a second tour of duty, he cared very much about people and put his caring to work in real ways.

For the past 16 years, he coached a Little League team in East L.A. because he believed that kids who played baseball didn’t use drugs or join gangs.

His love for his own four boys was obvious to anyone who knew him or who saw them playing basketball in the courts at Saybrook Park, just down the street. They went everywhere together. Even the 4-year-old shot baskets from daddy’s shoulders.

But Duron’s caring extended beyond family. Harvey tells about homeless people that Duron brought to his own modest stucco house to at least give them a good meal before they resumed their relentless wandering.

One was a pregnant woman Duron spotted under a freeway overpass. He fed and wanted to help her, but she disappeared before he could. He worried about her until the day he died.

There are 2,500 murders a year in L.A. County. At least some of the victims ought to be memorialized, if only to remind us how violence is not always limited to the violent.

Duron’s story appears here because Ivan Harvey is the kind of advocate who is determined that Duron should not be forgotten. I could sense his urgency in the telephone message he left to say that something had to be done about the killing of his friend.

Harvey has badgered police and other segments of the media with the same message, and he has wrenched promises from both “America’s Most Wanted” and “Prime Suspect” that they would look into the case.

Duron, a truck driver, was murdered March 16, but the story begins a year and a half before that. Sheriff’s Detective Richard Adams tells it this way:

Duron and his family, including parents and brothers, were barbecuing at Saybrook Park in Montebello when a man named Efrain Ariola came by with his daughter. Duron’s dog, a small Chihuahua, snapped at the girl and Ariola threw the animal across the lawn.

A subsequent fight climaxed when Duron, a burly 270-pounder, chased Ariola out of the park. But the incident didn’t end there.

According to family members, Ariola, 30, a member of the Mongols motorcycle gang, stalked Duron after that, on the street and in restaurants. Duron took it seriously. He recently asked his brother, Gus, to get closer to his four sons, saying, “I don’t think I’ll be living very much longer.”

A few days later, as he was walking from his sister-in-law’s house near the park, Duron died with a bullet in his back. The Sheriff’s Department has issued a murder warrant for Ariola’s arrest.

“I loved this man,” Harvey said to me the other day in his motor home at Saybrook Park. “He was like a big, sweet teddy bear, the kind of guy who was always there when you needed him.”

The two had been friends for several years. They fished and camped together, watched sporting events on television together and picnicked together with their families. When Duron was out of work, Harvey helped get him a job. When Harvey needed a favor, Duron was the first to volunteer.

“Our friendship wasn’t the kind you had to talk about or reinforce,” Harvey says. “It was just there and we both knew it.”

Harvey likes to tell about the time their families were at the beach and rowdy teen-agers began causing trouble nearby. Instead of confronting them, Duron talked quietly to them and eventually calmed them down. They left peacefully.

“You know,” Harvey says, “you hear about guys winning the lottery. It happens like a bolt of lightning hits them. Bob won the lottery of death. Someone snapped his fingers and he was gone.

“I was hurt. I cried. I got drunk. And then I got mad. A guy said about Bob, ‘What a man.’ That’s it. What a man. I had to tell someone.”

Wanted posters have been distributed throughout East L.A. Police are looking for the killer of Robert Duron. So is Ivan Harvey.

They were friends.