Life and Death in 3 Seconds

Al Eleby was on the ground in front of the state employment office last week, a loaded gun in his hand.

Los Angeles Police Department Officers Jose Herrera and John Key also were on the sidewalk, one on each side of Eleby -- bloodied, scared and off-balance. For about three seconds, the two officers had their guns drawn and pointed at Eleby’s torso.

Herrera and Key had to make a decision in those three seconds, a judgment they would relive again and again in ensuing days: to shoot, or not to shoot.

In the end, their LAPD superiors say, the two officers made the right choice.

LAPD officers may shoot people to protect themselves or others from death or serious injury. While acknowledging there may be little time for “meditation or reflection,” the department’s manual says officers should be guided by “a reverence of the value of human life” and use the minimum force necessary.

The two officers say they were guided by a combination of chance, trained reflexes and the simple desire to stay alive. They said they gave little thought to a key issue that governs the shooting of suspects by police: when to exercise restraint.

Accounts of exactly what happened on June 23 vary sharply. But there is consensus on how it started. Eleby had gone to the state office in South Los Angeles seeking a check. He was refused the money. Eleby pressed his demands, grew irate, went outside and exchanged words with a security guard.

He had a hand in his pocket. Onlookers feared he had a gun.

A call went out to police shortly after noon: a man making threats, possibly armed. What followed was a brief, violent confrontation that ended with Eleby, Herrera and Key on the ground, all three men armed.

Then Herrera and Key prepared to shoot Eleby.

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Jose Herrera is 27, married, with six years on the job, the child of Mexican immigrants who calls Spanish his first language and grew up in the LAPD’s Newton Division south of downtown.

Herrera said the officers pulled up and saw Eleby pacing, “slowly, like he wasn’t all there.” They pointed their guns, and Herrera said he told Eleby to approach with his hands on top of his head.

“For what?” Herrera recalled Eleby asking. Herrera noticed Eleby, at 6 feet 2 and 240 pounds, had the advantage in height and weight; he seemed argumentative. Herrera thought, “This isn’t going to be easy.”

The confrontation was, at this point, he said, not terribly unusual.

Calls to police about men with guns, though unnerving to officers, are fairly common for 77th Street Division officers, Herrera said. “Ninety-five percent of times, people mouth off and it doesn’t go any farther.”

Herrera grabbed Eleby’s hands, preparing to handcuff him. Then he felt the larger man stiffen. Herrera gripped both of Eleby’s wrists and pulled his arms down, thinking he would hold Eleby so Key could put on the handcuffs.

But Eleby was pulling away. “He was very strong. I couldn’t hold him,” Herrera said. As Eleby spun away, Herrera tried to tackle him and felt a hard knock against his holster. Then, as both men were falling to the sidewalk, Herrera said, he caught a glimpse of Eleby’s extended hand, holding a gun.

“When I see that gun, a million things go through my mind,” he recalled. “Just in that instant second -- so many things: One, that it wasn’t an ordinary gun -- a normal gun that you see on the street. Two, that it looked like mine. Three ... that I wasn’t going to be killed by my own gun.”

At that moment, he said, his eyes were focused only on the gun in Eleby’s hand. Herrera’s first thought was how to regain his balance, and grab his backup gun from a pocket. He remembers thinking about his wife, and wanting to get home.

Eleby had him by the belt, pulling at him, Herrera said. He hit Eleby’s face hard with his elbow twice, broke away, spun around on his knees and drew his backup gun.

Eleby was still down, now on his side, his back toward Herrera.

Herrera pressed his gun into Eleby’s back and prepared to shoot. Then he realized that his partner, Key, was on the other side of Eleby, also pointing his gun. His eyes froze on Key’s gun, a foot away.

If Key tried to shoot Eleby, Herrera realized, the bullet would go through Eleby’s torso into his own. Likewise, Herrera thought, his own shot would go through Eleby and hit Key.

Herrera tried to shift his position, to move his gun higher on Eleby’s back so he could shoot Eleby without hitting Key.

It would all be over in a few seconds, but Herrera was jittery for hours afterward. He felt angry about having someone take away his gun. He lied to his wife about it when he got home, finally telling her the truth five days later.

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LAPD Officer John Key, 29, is a former security officer in the Air Force, half Japanese and half African American, with six years in the department. He is much more taciturn than Herrera, and spoke hesitatingly, looking away as he told his version of the story.

Key said Eleby at first was compliant, but tensed up when Herrera grabbed his arms.

Key called for backup on his radio and ran over to join the tussle. As Key lunged, he felt himself struck hard on the face. He fell forward and all three men hit the ground. Key hit Eleby twice in the stomach with his fist, then reached for the emergency button on his radio.

He heard Herrera call out, and saw that Eleby had a gun.

It was like a movie, Key said, everything seeming to move slowly within an instant.

“I see a .45 Smith & Wesson in his right hand,” Key said. “He is holding it and slowly bringing it up from the ground toward us.”

He grabbed Eleby’s wrist and pushed the gun toward the ground, then pulled out his own weapon. He put the gun against Eleby’s stomach to shoot him. In that second, all his attention was on his gun. “It’s a split second,” he said. “You grab it, you got it, and boom -- you are going to end it.”

By chance, the tip of his gun was being pressed hard enough against Eleby’s twisting torso to nudge the slide out of position, making it impossible to fire the gun at that instant.

Key inwardly cursed. Eleby was still grappling, and Key furiously drew his gun back, repositioning to shoot.

Only then did Key see Herrera on the other side of Eleby and realized that he had nearly shot his partner.

Hours later, that instant would keep coming back. “That is all I could think about in the next few days,” Key said. “It kept going over and over in my mind. I couldn’t shake it.”

Key had lost track of something else: He was still holding Eleby’s wrist, pinning the gun.

When he realized this, Key yelled at Eleby to drop the weapon.

Eleby opened his hand and the gun fell. Key kicked it away. Other officers arrived on the scene and Eleby was arrested.

Afterward, Key looked down at his hands and saw they were shaking. He felt a sense of disbelief. When he got home, he and his wife had an argument after he tried to downplay the confrontation.

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Al Eleby, 40, is an unemployed quality-control engineer from Tupelo, Miss. He is tall and athletic but not bulky, with slightly graying hair. He is an African American. Blacks are disproportionately killed by police nationwide.

He has a college degree in science and, according to police, no violent criminal record. He acknowledged being arrested before, on charges of drunk driving and drug possession, police said.

Eleby spoke with pride of his education and work history during an interview in L.A. County’s Twin Towers Jail. He said he had been a football star in his hometown, and had been living in Los Angeles with a girlfriend and her children. He said his parents, now retired, have been married more than 50 years.

He described himself as a working man down on his luck, and appeared frightened during the interview.

Eleby said he had been laid off recently from a job inspecting metal detectors. His unemployment check was four weeks late, and he had been suffering a series of humiliations.

He said he had been out of money for some time, living on red beans and crackers, his relationship fraying, his girlfriend’s children hungry. He described how he begged for bus fare to the employment office at Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street.

Eleby said he grew frustrated over several hours. He described being sent from one person to the next. Nobody could help. He got upset, left, and tried to beg a few dollars from a security guard. The guard, Eleby said, mistook his hand in his pocket for a gun.

When police arrived moments later, Eleby thought they would search him. Instead, they moved to handcuff him, Eleby said. One officer grabbed one of his hands, he said, but then paused. Eleby said he couldn’t understand why the officer did not cuff both of his hands.

Then, he said, the officers pushed him to the ground and began hitting him. He said he told them to stop but they wouldn’t. Eleby recalled thinking that the hitting might just go on and on. He said he grabbed a gun from one of the officers in a desperate act of self defense.

Eleby said he saw Herrera pull out a hidden gun -- the officer’s backup weapon. Eleby said he recalled thinking that Herrera and Key were going to plant the gun on him.

One side of Eleby’s face remains discolored, and he said he hasn’t been able to feel his teeth since police hit him. He has pleaded not guilty to six felony charges, including assault with a firearm on a police officer. His bail is set at $300,000.

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The officers’ supervisor, Sgt. Shannon Allan, had the task of interviewing both men and investigating the confrontation. She gave a polished account that blended Herrera’s and Key’s recollections. Hers is more fluid and sequential than either officer’s, and contained such interpretations as Eleby deciding “that the fight was on” when Herrera tried to handcuff him.

At the same time, her account omitted other details, such as Key’s description of almost having shot Herrera but for having his gun jam.

Officers kill people at far lower per capita rates today than they did in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Justice Department. The 370 people killed nationwide by law enforcement in 2001 -- the last year for which numbers are available -- represented about 2% of all homicide victims in the United States.

Rates have also fallen on the other side of the equation. Police work is safer than it once was, the Justice Department reports, and is not among the nation’s top-10 list of most dangerous jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But police officers remain more than three times as likely as the average U.S. worker to die on the job. Five LAPD officers have died from gunshots in the last 10 years. In 2002, 56 officers were slain nationwide. In four of the killings last year, the weapon used was the officer’s own gun.

Like other LAPD supervisors, Sgt. Allan said the confrontation at the employment office could easily have ended in a death, and the officers deserve praise for their “restraint and maturity.”

She and other LAPD colleagues say the incident shows a counterpoint to police shootings in which officers have been criticized for not exercising restraint.

Herrera and Key say concern for Eleby’s life did not figure into their actions.

On the contrary, Herrera said, he was guided in those three seconds by instincts formed through constant drills in the use of firearms. And the desire to live.

If there had not been a chance that his bullet would have struck his partner, Herrera said, he would have shot Eleby and in that moment would not have given a thought to the man’s life.

Key also spoke of reacting out of trained instinct. Had he killed Eleby, he said, he would have felt justified. Eleby “is lucky he is not a dead man,” Key said.

Sometime afterward, Herrera said, he finally did begin to think about Eleby as a human being -- a man, nearly killed by his hand.

Herrera said he imagined himself at Christmas parties with his family, and how different he would feel from everybody else. He wondered whether Eleby had a mother who would mourn him. He realized that no matter how justified the shooting, it would have stayed with him always.

Herrera concluded that it is naive to assume officers in fear for their lives will pause to ponder the question of restraint. “As a human you don’t want to do it,” he said, “but when it’s a life or death situation -- “ His voice trailed off.

He spoke about how, in the moment, all he saw was the gun, and all he thought about was getting out alive.

“It’s a confusing feeling,” he said.

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Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.