14 Sep

(Video: Rich Marosi/Robert J. Lopez) I spent 22 years at the Los Angeles Times, where I worked on investigative and multimedia projects across the United States and in Mexico and Central America. I had a wonderful career and was part of a team of reporters that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing government corruption in Bell, a small city southeast of Los Angeles. But I was offered a great job and realized that it was time to take on a new and exciting challenge.
16:34 / blogging
20 Mar

In 1994, I filed my first California Public Records Act Request to review the Sheriff's Department files on Ruben Salazar. The department denied the request, saying the records were confidential law enforcement files. I made another CPRA request in 1995. It, too, was denied. Then in early 2010, as the 40th anniversary of Salazar's slaying approached, I filed another request with Sheriff Lee Baca. He refused to release the files. RELATED: Documents - View FBI and LAPD Records on Ruben Salazar I produced several reports and a video after Baca's denial, which sparked an outcry from members of the Salazar family, activists, journalists and elected officials -- all of whom said it was time for the department to come clean on the case and release its records. Finally, in late February 2011, Baca agreed to allow a limited viewing of the once-secret records by journalists and academics.
11:37 / Investigative Reporting
27 Feb

Ruben Salzar's Legacy Lives On from Robert Lopez on Vimeo.

To this day, questions still swirl around the death of L.A. Times columnist and KMEX news director Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a Sheriff's deputy on Aug. 29, 1970. I produced this Ruben Salazar video, pictured above, in 2008 after the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp honoring the reporter's legacy. My Column One article was written in 1995 for  the L.A. Times on the 25th anniversary of the newsman's slaying. I relied on a variety of sources, including friends and colleagues of Salazar, as well as documents from the FBI and LAPD, to reconstruct the final weeks before Salazar was killed by a sheriff's deputy while covering an anti-Vietnam War rally that exploded into violence. I also wrote a follow-up article in 1999, after waiting nearly six years for the FBI's Salazar file.

19:10 / Investigative Reporting / Web Video