Police Records of and Response to the Moratorium

The special report of the LA County Sheriff's Investigation into the Homicide of Ruben Salazar was only made available to community members forty years after his untimely demise. The report revealed that Salazar had been lying on the floor of the Silver Dollar Bar for nearly three hours before homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department finally arrived to examine his body. Deputy Sheriff Thomas Wilson, the one responsible for firing the tear gas canister was never formally prosecuted despite the fact that the Los Angeles County did pay $700,000 to the Salazar family to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. There is a warming label on the tear gas canister that states that it should not be aimed directly at someone and the hearing officer at the inquest failed to twice subpoena the sheriff's manager to find out the policy of utilizing teargas in crowd deesculation scenarios. 

Many folks from the community are still skeptical about the circumstances of his death as many believe that the tear gas canister would have likely destroyed his skull but his face was largely still intact during his open casket funeral. His role as a columnist and as news director of KMEX made him Los Angeles' leading Latino media voice, and he used his positions to write critiques on police abuse. Prior to his untimely murder, LAPD had sent plainsclothes police officers to attempt to persuade Salazar to stop covering stories of police coverups with such rhetoric as this type of information can be "dangerous in the minds of barrio people."