Witness to slaying by LAPD officer disputes police account

A teenager who witnessed his friend being fatally shot by a Los Angeles motorcycle officer offered a dramatically different account of the encounter than police Friday, saying the man was killed while trying to surrender and wasn’t carrying anything in his hands.

A police official overseeing the shooting investigation confirmed that the teenager gave investigators a similar account, but said detectives believe he is lying. Two bystanders saw the suspect approach officers with an object in his hand, according to the official.

The object, which turned out to be a 24-inch metal microphone stand, was recovered at the scene, police said.

“There is absolutely no credence to any part of his story,” said Capt. Kris Pitcher, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Force Investigation Division. “It is absolutely untrue.”

Investigators, however, have refused to confirm an earlier account by police that the man, Byron San Jose, 25, had come at officers swinging the microphone stand when he was shot Wednesday evening by LAPD Officer Derek Mousseau after a brief car chase. That issue, among many other details of the incident that unfolded along Valerio Street in Van Nuys, remains under investigation, Pitcher said.

Meanwhile Friday, San Jose’s family mourned the loss of a son and brother, remembering a young man with dreams of becoming a hip-hop artist. San Jose’s mother tearfully recalled how her son promised to buy her a mansion once he made it in the music business.

“My son was not an animal. He was a human being,” said Maria San Jose. “He was worth something. He was not the person they’re saying he was. He had dreams.”

Family members, who acknowledged that San Jose was convicted last year of possessing a loaded handgun, were at a loss to reconcile the police account with the statements of San Jose’s friend, Jose Torres.

Torres, 16, who witnessed the shooting through the rear window of the car, said in an interview with The Times that his friend had nothing in his hands when he got out of the vehicle and that the microphone stand was in the back seat at the time of the shooting.

“He raised his hands up in the air. I saw they were empty,” Torres said.

The incident began shortly after 7 p.m. when Mousseau and his partner tried to pull over a 1993 Saturn sedan.

Police had initially reported that the two officers made the stop believing the car was stolen, but later changed that, saying that the driver had committed an unspecified moving violation.

Torres said he was in the back seat with San Jose and another friend, Victor Fuentes. The driver, Torres said, was the cousin of another friend in the front passenger seat but did not know the others.

The five had just left San Jose’s home and were headed to a nearby house, where a friend of San Jose’s had agreed to let the aspiring rap artist use his music recording equipment, Torres and San Jose’s brother said.

The driver, whom police did not identify and whose name Torres did not know, obeyed the officers’ command to pull over but sped away after one officer asked to see his driver’s license. He was apparently afraid that police would realize there was a warrant for his arrest, Pitcher said.

“We were screaming at him to pull over. We were yelling, ‘We don’t want no part of this!’ ” Torres said.

When the car got caught behind other vehicles at a traffic signal after a few blocks, San Jose jumped out with his empty hands raised, Torres said. The driver tried to flee again, but could not get around traffic. Torres, watching from about 15 feet away, said Mousseau’s partner drove his motorcycle up to San Jose.

San Jose lowered his hands to place them against the motorcycle’s headlight to protect himself as the officer lurched the motorbike forward and pushed him backward a few feet, Torres said.

With the car’s windows rolled down, Torres said he could hear San Jose saying to the officer, “Chill! Chill! Chill Out! What . . . are you doing?” At the same moment, Mousseau dismounted from his motorcycle, approached San Jose on his right side and shot him at least three times in his chest from close range, Torres said.

But investigators interviewed two independent eyewitnesses who said they saw San Jose holding the metal stand, Pitcher said.

Investigators have also been told that San Jose was “walking briskly” toward the officers after he got out of the car, Pitcher said.

After the shots were fired, the driver of the car again sped away. Torres said the microphone stand remained in the car after the four men abandoned it on a side street about a mile away -- an assertion that conflicts with police reports, which said the stand was found close to San Jose’s body.

The scene around the body was quickly sealed off by police, with only the department’s Internal Affairs investigators allowed access, and Mousseau and his partner were separated from each other to prevent collusion, Pitcher said.

Luis Castillo, an attorney representing San Jose’s family, said he planned to take the first step next week toward filing a lawsuit against the city.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

Times staff writer Paloma Esquivel contributed to this report.