| Notes |
- SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
SALVADORAN ARMY OFFICER INVESTIGATED IN SLAYING OF U.S. BUSINESSMAN
DATE: Wednesday, March 19, 1986
Dallas Morning News
A Salvadoran army officer is being investigated in the slaying of a U.S. businessman, officials said. Lt. Jose Carlos Byron Lazo and a civilian friend, Carlos Alberto Romero, told investigators they were with Peter Hascall when he was shot early on the morning of Feb. 15 outside his apartment complex. Romero was imprisoned Feb. 17 and charged with homicide March 6. Lazo has not been charged with any offense, officials said.
Hascall, who had resided in El Salvador since June 1985, worked as a consultantfor Swift Ships Inc., of Morgan City, La. The company manufactures small industrial boats. Hascall serviced and sold spare parts for Swift Ships to the Salvadoran navy.
The principal witness in the case, a student who asked to remain unidentified, has received two death threats since speaking with Salvadoran and U.S. officials. The student, who happened onto the scene a few minutes after the shooting, said he was told by soldiers in the vicinity to keep quiet. ''They said to me, 'You saw nothing,' " the student said. "They repeated this several times until I finally told them that I had seen nothing
He said he's attempting to leave the country.
On the night of the slaying, Hascall had been drinking with Romero and Lazo in La Marea, a bar in the capital. Witnesses said that Hascall met the Salvadorans at La Marea. The witnesses said the 35-year-old businessman was wearing combat fatigues and carrying three weapons: a .357 magnum, a .44 Colt and a smaller handgun. There is no indication that Hascall had any connection with the U.S. or Salvadoran military.
The proprietress of the bar told police that she had introduced Hascall and Lazo. She said that Lazo told Hascall: ''I don't like it that a gringo comes here and gives me orders." The three men left the bar for Hascall's apartment where he changed from the fatigues into civilian clothes.
''Peter came back to the house with two men late at night and changed his clothes," said Margareta Galeas, Hascall's wife. "He told me he was with two friends, one of whom was a lieutenant, and that he would be back later. About five minutes later I heard five or six shots."
Lazo and Romero, who both admitted that they were armed the night of Hascall's killing, contend that Hascall fired at a speeding motorcycle and a car outside the apartment complex and that he was killed by return fire from the two vehicles. Seven witnesses in the vicinity, including the student, said they did not see or hear cars on the road before the shooting.
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THE MIAMI HERALD
AMERICAN'S DEATH AS FOGGY AS HIS PAST
Sunday, March 2, 1986
TIM GOLDEN Herald Staff Writer
In a country that attracts foreign adventurers, there was nothing to particularly distinguish Peter Stryker Hascall, an American roaming El Salvador in camouflage fatigues with a .44- caliber Magnum in a shoulder holster, a 9mm pistol tucked into his waist and a foggy past. He was a tallish, heavyset, bearded man with dark eyes. Tattooed on his left shoulder was a drawing of the Salvadoran Indian warrior Atlacatl, namesake of an elite U.S.-trained Salvadoran infantry battalion. He talked sometimes about war experiences in Vietnam, but never quite clearly enough for Margarita Galeas, the Salvadoran woman he lived with, to figure whether they had been Hascall's or a friend's. He was clear about leftist guerrillas and communism, though. He didn't like them.
On Saturday, Feb. 8, Hascall, 35, was shot to death about 3 a.m. in front of the litter-strewn apartment complex where he lived with Galeas, 37, and her daughter. More than two weeks later, nobody is quite sure why Peter Stryker Hascall was shot or even what he was doing in El Salvador.
The Salvadoran rebel news agency Salpress, citing guerrilla Radio Farabundo Marti, identified Hascall as a U.S. military adviser "brought to justice" by urban guerrilla commandos. The Salpress report has never been confirmed or repeated by the more powerful rebel station, Radio Venceremos. The U.S. Embassy said Hascall was not employed or connected in any way with the U.S. government.
When Hascall came to El Salvador last summer, he quickly tapped into one of the country's primary foreign business opportunities -- the 6-year-old civil war. He hooked up with the navy, one of the more interesting, lesser-known elements of the Salvadoran military. Navy patrol boats and Pirana speedboats in the Gulf of Fonseca, aided by U.S. advisers, watch for arms shipments from Nicaragua to the Salvadoran guerrillas. They have never found any.
Hascall told Galeas that he spent a lot of his time with the handful of U.S. advisers, living in their big house in La Union. He once brought two Americans to the apartment, a Chicano and a blond man.
People who knew him in El Salvador -- none apparently very well -- recalled Hascall as private and quiet, but friendly. Tranquilo was the general one-word summary. As Galeas tells it, Hascall was just cooling his heels in El Salvador after working for about five years running petroleum exploration boats in Mexico for U.S. companies working under the state oil company, Pemex. It was in Mexico that they had met, the big gringo boat captain and the pretty peasant sister of two of his co-workers. He lived with her for months at a time in a more upscale apartment, returning to Mexico to work until last year.
The Salvadoran navy commander, Col. Humberto Villalta, said Hascall showed up in his office one day asking how Villalta might feel about Hascall representing Swiftships Inc. The Morgan City, La., shipbuilding firm had sold two patrol boats to the navy in 1984 and 1985, both paid for with U.S. aid funds. "The truth is that it did seem strange to me," Villalta said. He added that it was "possible" that Hascall was involved in some sort of intelligence-gathering activities. He didn't think so.
Hascall apparently had no connection to Swiftships when he had the first of their four or five meetings that Villalta remembers. For reasons that have not been fully explained, Swiftships officials first told reporters asking about the slain man that he had never worked for the firm. They subsequently described him as a "part-time consultant" who "interfaced" between the company and the Salvadoran navy.
Galeas bought him some beer that Friday, and he sat around the house in his fatigues, drinking about 10 bottles before going out at about 10 p.m., according to an official involved in the investigation. Hascall met a young friend about two hours later. They went for a drink at a corner juke box place, La Marea. About two hours later, the official said, Hascall asked the friend if two men in the corner of the bar were police. The friend didn't know. He left Hascall and went home.
In police custody are a lieutenant and a sergeant of the Salvadoran army's Bracamonte infantry battalion who accompanied Hascall, by this time quite drunk, to his apartment so he could change out of his camouflage jacket and fatigues. Galeas awoke when they came into the house. He put his head on her lap and told her without being specific that he was sorry for all the problems he had caused her. "He seemed sad to me and I put my hand on his head and told him not to go," she recalled. "He said, 'I'm going.' " He walked with the two soldiers down to the street, in front of the San Salvador zoo. According to one oft-repeated version, a Toyota sedan sped by, almost hitting him. He fired a shot in the air with the Magnum. Someone shot back. Peter Stryker Hascall died, the victim of a street crime, a business deal gone bad or the civil war. No one is quite sure.
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SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
REBELS CLAIM SLAYING
DATE: Tuesday, February 18, 1986
Mercury News Wire Services
Leftist guerrillas claimed responsibility for the weekend slaying of an American who reportedly worked as an adviser to the Salvadoran navy, reports said Monday. Peter Stryker Hascall, 35, who lived in San Salvador for five years, died early Saturday, when he was gunned down by unknown attackers. Rebels said Hascall was one of the 55 U.S. military advisers training the Salvadoran army, but a U.S. Embassy official said he was a merchant marine who may have worked as an adviser to the Salvadoran navy.
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SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
AMERICAN 'MARINE CONSULTANT' SHOT, KILLED IN EL SALVADOR
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1986
By TIM GOLDEN, Knight-Ridder News Service
A shadowy American who reportedly worked with the Salvadoran navy was shot and killed in San Salvador before dawn on Saturday under mysterious circumstances. Peter Stryker Hascall, 35, whose last U.S. address was Galveston, Texas, in 1981, was shot once in the chest with a large-caliber handgun, authorities said.
After several shots were heard, Hascall was found on the street in front of the apartment complex where he lived with a Salvadoran woman, their four-year-old daughter and the woman's other daughter.
The San Salvador judge in charge of the case, Justice of the Peace Rosario Goches Castro, said the only apparent witnesses to the killing were two Salvadoran men who had been drinking with Hascall and returned to the apartment with him at about 2 a.m. According to Goches and neighbors in the apartment complex, Hascall left the apartment with the two men at about 2:40 a.m. and was shot minutes later. Both of the men were said to have fled.
According to Goches and two neighbors, Hascall was armed with a .44-caliber Magnum handgun, which he carried in a shoulder holster, and a smaller pistol he carried in his belt. Goches said the police investigation would not reveal until later this week whether Hascall had fired either of his guns.
Hascall's companion, Margarita Galdeas, could not be reached for comment, but her daughter Marisol, 14, and other teen-agers interviewed at the apartment said a night watchman who had seen the two men identified them as a sergeant and lieutenant of the Salvadoran army.
Neither Goches nor a National Police lieutenant familiar with the case could confirm the identity of the men, and no officials of the unit to which they were said to have belonged -- the elite Bracamonte infantry battalion -- could be reached for comment.
Almost as mysterious was the occupation of Hascall. A 6-foot, 220-pound man with reddish-brown hair and a beard, Hascall carried a card from the U.S. Coast Guard identifying him as a merchant seaman. However, he was variously described by Goches, friends and neighbors as a sales representative for a company called Swiftship, of Morgan City, La., an adviser to the Salvadoran navy and a free-lance boat captain. Hascall carried cheap-looking business cards identifying himself as a "marine consultant" based out of the San Salvador apartment and as "Capt. Peter Hascall" with a post office box address in Morgan City.
In a broadcast Saturday morning, the guerrilla Radio Farabundo Marti identified Hascall as a U.S. military adviser but attributed no responsibility for the slaying. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said Hascall did not work for the U.S. government. "He is not a loose-cover spook (CIA agent)," a U.S. official said. "He does not work for the U.S. Embassy." Several U.S. Embassy officials who arrived at the Isidro Menendez morgue appeared tense and refused to answer any questions or let photographers take pictures of Hascall's body. Hascall is believed to be the 18th American killed in El Salvador since civil war broke out in 1979.
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New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957
Pan American Worl Airways Passenger Manifest
From Kindley Field, Bermuda to Idlewild, New York
April 24, 1954
Robert S. Hascall
Elizabeth H. Hascall
Peter S. Hascall
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1951 - 1986 (35 years)
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