Memories of a Slaying That Split Latinos

It had the earmarks of that trial scheduled to get under way this week in the Criminal Courts Building.

It had racial overtones. He was trying to make it in a world he didn’t grow up in. She was from a wealthy family. After they started dating, he told her he’d love her forever. His affection seemed obsessive and it frightened her. In the end, she suffered a gruesome death from repeated blows to the head. Once the boy was arrested for the slaying, the girl’s parents were outraged by the publicity generated by the case: The boy’s impoverished background garnered him more sympathy than their daughter got in death.

All those memories came flooding back late last week with the news that Richard Herrin, a Chicano kid from L.A.’s Eastside, was paroled after serving 17 years in prison for killing his college sweetheart.

“I’d nearly forgotten about him,” one Chicano told me.

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It’s a very difficult case to forget.

Herrin was among the best and brightest that the Eastside had to offer. Born to an Indian-Mexican mother and an Irish father who soon left, Herrin grew up in Lincoln Heights, where he worked after school and attended church regularly with his mother. He graduated first in his class at Lincoln High School--where he was active in sports, student government and other extracurricular activities--in 1971.

Then he did something few Chicano kids had ever done. He went to Yale on a scholarship, graduating from the prestigious school in 1975. He kept going to Mass and got involved in the school’s Chicano student group. He was working on a master’s degree in geology at Texas Christian University when he was accepted into the doctoral program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for fall, 1977.

But as The Times noted at the time, Herrin never made it to Washington.

In July of 1977, he was visiting the Scarsdale, N.Y., home of Bonnie Garfield, his girlfriend who also was a student at Yale. There was no doubt that he loved her, having once written “I love you” 125 times in a letter to her and asking if it qualified as a love letter. But she wanted to end the relationship. She had written him to that effect and suggested that he seek “psychiatric help to help you deal with a flood of emotions which is probably beginning to overwhelm you.”

On the morning of July 7, authorities said, Herrin entered Garfield’s bedroom, made sure she was still asleep and smashed in her head and larynx with a claw hammer. He fled the comfortable home, but was captured later.

He was convicted the following year of first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.

Herrin’s case sparked an intense debate in Los Angeles. Opposing sides of Chicano activists, academics and others argued whether Latinos should go to an Ivy League school like Yale--far away from friends, family and familiar surroundings. By leaving home, some contended, these talented Chicanos contributed to a brain drain in a community that can’t afford it.

Today, it isn’t even a close call.

“Of course Chicano kids should go to Yale or Harvard,” says KMPC talk-show host Ruben Navarrette, who wrote a book about his years at the latter school. “The fact is, there are many Mexican Americans who went to Yale and Harvard who became lawyers and doctors and lead productive lives.”

Los Angeles public affairs manager Nancy Contreras, who earned a master’s at Yale after getting an undergraduate degree at UCLA, agrees. But with the start of the O.J. Simpson trial as a backdrop, she suspects that a little-discussed issue--domestic violence--could shed light on the Herrin case.

“This gives the Latino community an opportunity to examine domestic violence within its own relationships,” she says.

Adds another Ivy League-educated Chicana professional, who insisted that her name not be used: “I had to live with the Herrin case, arguing with my parents about whether I could go to Yale. Now I’m arguing with them about domestic violence. They don’t understand it.”

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Meanwhile, with Herrin, now 40, paroled to a new life in New Mexico, you can hear the anguish of Bonnie Garfield’s parents. It reminds me of what we have heard from the parents of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Paul Garfield, the dead girl’s father, told the Associated Press a month ago when Herrin’s parole was imminent: “He should be serving a life sentence. . . . He’ll have his whole life ahead of him when he gets out. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. . . . We’re serving the life sentence.”