2 Households Split Over How Best to Pursue Justice for Slain Deputy

In the months after Sheriff’s Deputy David March was shot to death, his parents and widow stood united in grief and in the hunt for his alleged killer, who is believed to be hiding in Mexico.

Together, they raged against the hurdles to returning the suspect to California, taking their campaign to Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Three years later, they still live just a few miles apart in the Santa Clarita area, where a park has been named for Dave March.

But the two households are divided, in sharp disagreement over how best to pursue justice for the fallen deputy, an ordeal marked by agonizing lessons in national and international affairs. And California politics have heaped fresh pain onto this family redefined by tragedy.

The former in-laws have been featured in dueling radio ads on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bid to revamp the state pension system for government employees, including law enforcement officers. Widow Teri March assailed the governor; parents John and Barbara March backed him.

“I feel like it’s been a nasty divorce,” Teri March, 35, said of the break, which had been deepening for some time. She dabbed at a tear and hugged her knees on the sofa in her sun-washed living room beside a photo album packed with pictures of Dave March. “It’s a lot to carry.”

The burden got heavier after she narrated the ad that attacked Schwarzenegger’s proposal to shift future pensions to 401(k)-style accounts.

“The governor’s plan will hurt the families of those who die keeping California safe,” she said in the ad.

John and Barbara March countered with a spot financed by Schwarzenegger boosters. It did not mention Teri March by name, but denounced those who would use Dave March’s memory to criticize the governor.

Like Teri March, the parents are Republicans who voted for Schwarzenegger.

“I am hurt and offended,” Barbara March said in the ad.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, a labor union, sponsored the Teri March commercial. Opposition from peace officers and firefighters forced the governor to withdraw his proposal after legal experts said it threatened death and disability benefits.

Both sides of the March family say they respect the other, and the parents in particular have sought to downplay the rift with the woman their son loved. They fear it will detract from their efforts to change U.S.-Mexican extradition policies that have kept hundreds of murder suspects beyond the reach of American courts.

“She did it with an open heart,” Barbara March, 59, said of the anti-Schwarzenegger ad.

“Teri is doing her thing,” said John March, 62, a designer of theme park attractions.

But as they sat in the front courtyard of their hilltop home in the suburban valley where Dave March grew up, they also hinted at lingering resentment.

“They should have asked our permission to do that ad,” Barbara March, a hypnotherapist, said of the police union.

If anyone should be resentful, Teri March said, it’s she. The parents’ commercial “seemed spiteful and somewhat vindictive,” she said.

She told of writing Schwarzenegger in October to plead for his help in extraditing the suspect in Dave March’s killing. The governor’s staff responded with what appeared to be a form letter that said extradition is a federal matter.

Teri March said the unsigned letter floored her. She said she had met Schwarzenegger in 2003, had given him a rose and told him of the extradition battle. He expressed sympathy and concern, she said.

In her living room, she held up the letter and shook it in fury. “Maybe they can answer why their buddy can’t take a position on their son’s murder,” she said of John and Barbara March.

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said the governor believes all murder suspects should be extradited from Mexico, but had no further comment because the issue is federal.

John and Barbara March said that they met with Schwarzenegger before doing the ad, and that he is an ally on extradition.

“We want very much for Teri to have a happy life, but we also want to accomplish our goals,” John March said.

He and his wife said Teri March’s new marriage shows that she is trying to move on, as she should. But they can’t.

“We’ve lost a son,” John March said. “We can’t get another one.”

*

Dave March was a big, cheerful man -- 6 feet 5, brawny, always smiling in family snapshots. His determination to become a peace officer consumed him. He took the entrance exam several times before the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department hired him.

“It was his life’s dream,” said Teri March, an MRI technician.

He worked about five years in a county jail, the long road to a patrol assignment. The week he died, he was scheduled to transfer to Santa Clarita, where he would be minutes from his wife and stepdaughter, Teri March’s girl from an earlier marriage.

Dave and Teri March were together seven years. They had bumped into each other at a restaurant, where he remarked that he’d had a secret crush on her back at Canyon High School. Teri March was smitten by his recollection.

“He had me right there at that moment,” she said. “I knew he was going to be the man I spent the rest of my life with.”

Their 1997 wedding was in his parents’ backyard. They would spend holidays with John and Barbara March at the elder couple’s Lake Arrowhead getaway.

“Life was just perfect,” Teri March said.

Dave March’s life ended during a routine traffic stop on an Irwindale street. He was 33.

“The guy who killed our son shot him and knocked him down,” John March said. “Then he went back ... “

“And executed him,” Barbara March said, completing her husband’s sentence, a slight tremor in her voice.

The killer shot Dave March first in the torso, in a space unprotected by the deputy’s bulletproof vest, and then in the head.

Authorities have identified the suspect as Jorge “Armando” Arroyo Garcia, 28, a Mexican national and convicted drug dealer who is also wanted here on two counts of attempted murder. He was in the United States illegally, and fled to Mexico, officials say.

*

Mexico does not extradite suspects who could be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole in the United States. In some circumstances, a suspect in a murder on American soil can be prosecuted and imprisoned in Mexico, where the maximum sentence is 60 years.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley is lobbying the U.S. and Mexican governments to find a way to bring Garcia back to Los Angeles. In addition, Cooley hopes to see all extradition roadblocks cleared for U.S. murder suspects thought to be in Mexico.

John and Barbara March support Cooley’s approach. They backed his successful push to rewrite the state’s double-jeopardy law so that defendants in a California murder who are acquitted or convicted in a foreign country can be retried here.

Meanwhile, the parents have turned the search for Garcia into a crusade called the March for Justice. It aims to renegotiate the extradition treaty between the two nations and reverse the effect of Mexican Supreme Court decisions that have made it tougher to send murder suspects to the United States. The campaign also advocates a crackdown on illegal immigration.

The parents have launched a nonprofit group, peppered President Bush and Congress with letters and appeared on talk shows to condemn Mexico’s position.

They helped persuade U.S. lawmakers to draft resolutions petitioning the Bush administration to negotiate a change in the extradition rules.

John March said he believes politicians in both parties are reluctant to press Mexico on extraditions and border security because of fears of alienating Latino voters or riling business interests that employ illegal immigrants.

“We were surprised at how ineffectual the American government is,” he said. “It’s been a very shocking realization.”

Last week, John and Barbara March went to Washington, as they have before, to present their case on Capitol Hill.

Teri March’s labors have largely mirrored those of the parents. She also went to Washington last week, her fifth trip there since her husband’s death.

In 2003, she and the parents met Bush at a police ceremony. The president, they recalled, had vowed to “get this guy” -- Garcia.

Now, Teri March stumps in Washington separately from John and Barbara March. She has become disillusioned with their big-picture assault on extradition barriers, and wants Garcia jailed and prosecuted immediately -- in Mexico, if need be.

“Getting on the television and bashing Mexico doesn’t work for me,” she said, referring to John and Barbara March. “I’m focused on justice for my husband.”

The parents say they understand her frustration, but are convinced their course would have been their son’s wishes.

“Trading Armando Garcia for Dave is a bad trade,” John March said. “Dave would be so insulted if we settled for just getting his killer back.”

Barbara March leaned forward in her courtyard chair. “Her mission, to our mind, is to get Armando Garcia,” she said of Teri March. She then opened her arms wide. “Our mission is to get all of them.”

*

John and Barbara March were the hosts of a March for Justice vigil Friday at Irwindale Speedway.

Teri March, who did not attend, said she was not formally invited. And March for Justice director Steve Spernak asked the Los Angeles Police Protective League to strike a reference to her from a flier for the event. The league declined to alter the flier.

Spernak, a Republican political consultant, said he had wanted only to avoid creating the impression that Teri March was a vigil organizer. She said his request was “cruel.”

Her new husband, Gabriel Astorga, sent an e-mail last month to Spernak complaining about the perceived exclusion of Teri March and her daughter, Kayla, from the campaign. Astorga, an ultrasound technician, met Teri March at work; they were married last year.

“This family has no unity,” Astorga wrote to Spernak.

John March responded by e-mail, saying that neither he nor his wife knew Teri March’s new address or phone number.

He said in his e-mail that she had walked out of a meeting with a member of Congress, and had not included him or his wife in the dedication of a plaque for Dave March at an Irwindale park (an “innocent oversight,” Teri March said).

“In words and deeds, she has terminated our relationship,” the father wrote.

The e-mail exchange occurred around the time of the tit-for-tat ads on Schwarzenegger’s pension initiative.

In the end, however, the parents and widow speak as one when the topic is the joy Dave March brought into their lives.

“He’d walk into the room and the whole chemistry of the room changed,” Barbara March said, her eyes moist.

Not far away, in the home where she is trying to rebuild her life, Teri March fought back her own tears.

“I’m forever grateful to them,” she said. “They made a beautiful son.”