Finally, on October 2, 1944, the Second District Court of Appeals overturned the Sleepy Lagoon verdicts and Judge Clement Nye dismissed the case, clearing the boys’ records. Leyvas had been imprisoned for nearly two years. The boys returned to a Los Angeles and a Mexican American community that had been forever changed.
Yet the boys were eager to return to their old lives. Hank Leyvas quickly started working and even resumed a relationship with his old girlfriend. He remained embittered, however, and not long after his release was imprisoned for selling drugs, this time for ten to twelve years.
In later years, Leyvas’s life became more stable. He operated a restaurant, Hank’s, on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, where members of his family worked. Members of the Brown Berets, a Chicano youth movement born in 1960s Los Angeles, occasionally sought his counsel. While Hank did have girlfriends, he never married. On July 6, 1971, Hank left a bar in East Los Angeles to call home from a phone booth and tell his family he would be there soon. He went back inside and not long after, he died of a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old.
‘The same person, under different circumstances,’ remembered Ben Margolis, the lawyer who represented the Sleepy Lagoon defendants on appeal, ‘would have moved toward leadership. He was very bright, not much education; he had great emotions. But most important was … that of all of them, he had the greatest sense that he was a member of a group that was being walked on, being discriminated against, and that he was going to fight against it … He was going to carry on the fight wherever he was … regardless of what would happen to him, he was totally courageous and [showed] no physical fear as far as you could tell.’ PBS online article, Zoot-Suit Riots