This will be a bit longer than my usual stuff, but there is a lot to cover.
The Times of Dec. 12, 1969, reported on a burglary of the administration building of Sequoia High School in Redwood City during the early morning hours by two Redwood City residents: 20-year-olds Eugene Gerard Magnan and Richard Anthony Bojo. Both men were alums of the high school and were currently enrolled in the College of San Mateo system.
The burglar alarm went off at 12:48 a.m., and two police officers responded and were joined soon after by four more officers.
Then everything got confusing.
Magnan and Bojo didn't see the policemen but got spooked and decided to flee the building. In running out the front door, one of the policemen was hit in the face, possibly by a swinging door. He subsequently fired on the pair, and two of his fellow officers joined in by firing shotguns at the fleeing men. Bojo was not hit and kept running, but Magnan "fell mortally wounded into a flower bed."
It wasn't until much later in the morning that more facts in the case came to light.
Magnan and Bojo had broken a window to get into the administration building. They raided several rooms in the building, including the chemistry and audio-visual departments. They unsuccessfully tried to open a safe but left abruptly when the police arrived.
After Magnan was shot in the back and the back of the head, Bojo ran out of the front gates of the high school and down the middle of El Camino Real to the Greyhound Bus depot about a block away from the high school. He hid among the buses until he was flushed out of his hiding place behind a Blue Ribbon Ice Cream store, where he was quickly captured. Metal pins from the hinges of doors in the administration building were found in his pockets. He was booked at the county jail on a burglary charge and arraigned in the Southern District Municipal Court.
When asked for a formal statement about the suspects, Police Chief John R. McDonald Jr. said both men were "hippie types with long hair and moustaches." The high school principal, Robert E. Biggs, had a slightly different recollection of the two former students: "(Magnan was) a very good student who showed up and did all his work." Bojo had been a member of the cross-country track team. Neither man had a police record or a reputation for getting into trouble.
Almost immediately, there were rumblings in the community about the possible use of excessive force on the part of the police. There was undoubtedly confusion in the rush of Magnan and Bojo fleeing the administration building, but neither man had tried to engage the officers in any way, and no weapons or burglary tools had been visible. Indeed, The Times reported on Jan. 16, 1970, that Redwood City Councilman John S. Roselli went on record calling for an investigation into the council's policy of not allowing an open public discussion of the burglary and its aftermath. Roselli called for a forum to discuss "the use of firearms (and) the possibility of establishing a citizens police review board." The overseeing committee referred the topic to the county's Legal Aid Society and Human Relations Commission.
In mid-April of 1970, Bojo was found guilty of second-degree burglary after a 12-day trial before a jury of seven men and five women. Bojo's attorney requested that Judge Allison M. Rouse give Bojo probation due to his excellent performance in his classes at Canada College. The Times was able to report at the same time that councilman Roselli's request for establishing a council review board was "rejected by the city council."
John Kelly was a 17-year-old student at Sequoia High School at the time of the incident and remembers it. "I can tell you that many students, including myself, felt kind of dazed and shocked by the affair, as well as saddened, as those kinds of things just didn't happen in Redwood City. I did not know either of the two, so I didn't have that familiarity with them. Thus, I was probably not as distraught by what happened."
Was the force used by the responding officers excessive? Was the city council wrong in not allowing public discussion of the situation? How would the situation be different if it happened today? Please leave your thoughts in the Comments section below.
