Killed by Policeman’s Stray Bullet : Family of Slain Man Gets Award From City

At 10:10 p.m. on a summer evening in 1981, Larry Pritchett leaned out the front door of his 63rd Street home in San Diego to see what all the commotion was about.

The 29-year-old black welder was immediately hit in the head by a stray .38-caliber bullet, fired by a police officer in pursuit of two robbers who had stolen $50 from a liquor store. Pritchett died.

On Monday, 3 1/2 years later, the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to award $100,000 to Pritchett’s family.

On Dec. 10, Superior Court Judge Gilbert Harelson had awarded the Pritchetts the $100,000 on condition that it be ratified by the City Council.

The figure was far lower than the $25 million originally sought in a suit filed in March, 1982, by Pritchett’s family. The suit was filed against Police Chief William Kolender and Officer Stephen Williamson.

Still, family attorney Clifton Blevins said, “the family is satisfied with the agreement that was hammered out . . . I think it’s a fair settlement for all the parties involved.”

The suit charged that Williamson “negligently and carelessly shot” in Pritchett’s direction. It was filed by Pritchett’s mother and father, Mrs. Charlie B. Pritchett and Lou Pritchett Sr., and his three sisters and three brothers. The original $25-million figure was based on the family’s deprivation of “the society, comfort, protection, service and support of” Pritchett.

A district attorney’s investigation exonerated Williamson in 1981, angering some San Diego blacks who felt it was a “typically ‘whitey’ reaction to a shooting of a black,” Rabbi Aaron Gottesman, who was riding in Williamson’s patrol car that night, recalled Monday.

Williamson is still a patrol officer, police spokesman Rick Carlson said.

The shooting occurred on July 8, 1981. A three-week investigation by police and the district attorney’s office concluded that Williamson, then 25, “was acting properly” and was not “criminally reckless” because of circumstances at the shooting scene.

The suspects had fled the scene in a car but encountered a steep uphill grade and abandoned the car, which rolled backward and rammed into a second patrol car. Williamson left his own patrol car and pursued them on foot. The shooting occurred moments later.

Williamson thought one of the suspects was reaching for a gun, so Williamson fired two shots at him, the district attorney’s investigation found. The shots went astray and one of them struck Pritchett in the head.

Pritchett was obscured from the officer’s vision by bushes and a tree, investigators concluded. Pritchett was taken to Paradise Valley Hospital, where he died 43 minutes after being shot, according to the county coroner’s office.

One of the suspected robbers was caught and the other escaped. A store clerk said one of the robbers was armed with a pistol, but police found no weapons.

Later, Gottesman received harassing phone calls, some from people who immediately hung up and others who snapped, “Tell what you saw, whitey,” the rabbi recalled.

The senselessness of such a tragedy makes it especially painful to all parties involved, Gottesman said. “I can always say to a (victim’s) family that this was not something meant to be aimed at them,” he said. “It was a case of a police officer acting as a police officer must: to prevent crime . . . All we can do is try to prevent it in the future.”