Kevan Baker wanted to forget Wanda Lopez's final moments. He ...

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732 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711 was doing everything she could to hold herself back. At one point, the attacker grabbed her hair and jerked so hard with both hands that Baker was sure her hair must have come out. “Oh fuck,” Baker thought. “I don’t want to be here. Get in the car and leave.” But he didn’t have it in him to desert the struggling woman. “As an American,” he said later, he felt he “should do the right thing. . . . To me it seemed like the right thing to do was go walk towards the door.” So he did. “The gentleman apparently knew I was there,” Baker recalled. “As I started towards the store, he throwed the clerk to the floor and met me at the door.” The man came out of the door, holding it open as he stood looking at Baker, about three feet away. The assailant’s greeting froze Baker in his tracks. “Don’t mess with me. I got a gun,” the man said. Baker saw nothing in the man’s hands, no gun or any money, but he stopped anyway and looked the man in the eye. “My main thing,” he explained, “was eye-to-eye contact, to make sure he didn’t use the gun on me if he actually had one.” After a second or two, the man turned to his left, showing Baker his right profile. Then he “sprinted” the few steps to the corner of the building and took another left, running north behind the gas station store. When the first officers arrived, several bystanders described a man running behind the gas station and north up Dodd, the narrow street between the gas station and Wolfy’s. North East West South Figure 1: Aerial photograph of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station in February 1983. Wolfy’s is at the bottom across Dodd Street from the gas station. Standing outside
2012] Los Tocayos Carlos, Part I, Chapter 2 733 the gas station store, about where a man in the photograph is walking, Kevan Baker watched the assailant exit the store, turn left (east), then left again (north) behind the store. Bystanders saw a man running behind the gas station store and north up Dodd Street. Later that night and again at the trial, Baker described the man he saw grappling with Wanda. He was Hispanic, had dark hair, stood 5’8” or 5’9”, and weighed about 170 pounds. Baker guessed he was twenty-four to twenty-six years old. Years later, he described the man as a little older, “young thirties, probably, maybe late twenties.” At a court hearing, Baker described the man as a “transient,” someone who looked like he’d “been on the street and was very hungry.” His clothes were shabby and unclean. He had quite a bit of facial hair: a full moustache and whiskers all over his face, like he “hadn’t shaved in, you know, ten days, a couple weeks.” He wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt of jacket with red in it, which Baker thought may have covered a grey or light-colored sweatshirt. * * * * * Baker didn’t move until he was sure the man was gone. He wasn’t taking any chances. The attacker “didn’t seem like he was on drugs or anything or like he was drunk,” Baker said. “He knew what he was doing.” After the man ran off behind the station, Baker took a few stunned steps back towards his car, not knowing what to do. A vehicle pulled in from the west. The driver rolled down his window, and Baker yelled for him to call the police. Then Baker noticed the clerk. She had staggered to the front door, barefoot, dripping a trail of blood. Baker went to her. “Th[e] young lady was coming out . . . and I met her at the door. . . . She just kind of come against me, and then fell back into the building, and started sliding down the side of the window right by the front door.” As he helped her down onto the concrete sidewalk, Wanda smeared blood on the window and on down the doorframe. There was blood all over her left side, front and back. Wanda was hysterical, pleading “Help me, help me” and trying to get up. Baker gently held her to the ground, telling her to “lay down, get calm.” Baker’s Navy training kicked in, and he looked for a wound. He pulled up Wanda’s sweater and found a slit in the left side of her bra. “A woman has an artery that goes to the breast,” he explained. “[T]hat’s what [the attacker] sliced.” Baker knew the clerk would bleed to death unless he could stanch the flow, and he went inside the store for something to use.
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