This LAPD accidental shooting of two people in a pickup delivering the morning paper occurred at the time just hours after Christopher Jordan Dorner had shot a number of LAPD officers and area police were on high alert.
Details emerge in LAPD's mistaken shooting of newspaper carriers
By Joel Rubin, Angel Jennings and Andrew Blankstein,
Los Angeles Times
It was around 5 a.m. in Torrance on Thursday and police from nearby El Segundo had seen a pickup truck exit a freeway and head in the general direction of the Redbeam Avenue residence of a high-ranking Los Angeles police official, which was being guarded by a group of LAPD officers.
The radio call indicated that the truck matched the description of Dorner's gray Nissan Titan.
A few minutes later, a truck slowly rolled down the quiet residential street.
As the vehicle approached the house, officers opened fire, unloading a barrage of bullets into the back of the truck. When the shooting stopped, they quickly realized their mistake. The truck was not a Nissan Titan, but a Toyota Tacoma. The color wasn't gray, but aqua blue. And it wasn't Dorner inside the truck, but a woman and her mother delivering copies of the Los Angeles Times.
Fortunately the 71 year woman who was wounded twice and is expected to recover while her daughter who was driving only suffered minor cuts from broken glass.
Law enforcement sources told The Times that at least seven officers opened fire. On Friday, the street was pockmarked with bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs. Residents said they wanted to know what happened.
"How do you mistake two Hispanic women, one who is 71, for a large black male?" said Richard Goo, 62, who counted five bullet holes in the entryway to his house.
Good Question!
Glen T. Jonas, the attorney representing the women, said the police officers gave "no commands, no instructions and no opportunity to surrender" before opening fire.
As bullets tore through the cabin, the two women "covered their faces and huddled down," Jonas said. "They felt like it was going on forever."
LAPD has a lot of questions to answer about how an erroneous radio report snowballed into riddling two innocent women's truck with bullets and a portion of a Torrance neighborhood along with it.
How could an early morning mis-identification lead to such a gross overreaction? And now LAPD officials are making excuses for it.