Sudden Death : Families of Police Shooting Victims Tell of Their Shock

Lenita Harrison was at work the night Inglewood police officers shot her son. After police notified her of the shooting, she rushed to a local hospital.

When she asked where Reginald Harrison was, she said she was nonchalantly told that his body had been sent to the coroner’s office. “He’s busy and we wanted to save him a trip,” she was told, she said. And that’s how Lenita Harrison said she found out on March 26 that her 22-year-old son was dead.

Mary Robertson recalled the afternoon deputies from the Lynwood sheriff’s station visited her Lynwood home and asked if she had a son named Danny Ray Robertson.

“He’s dead,” the deputies said, according to Robertson. “You all didn’t know? It was on the 6 o’clock news.” And that’s how Robertson said she learned that her 19-year-old son had died in the hospital about nine hours earlier.

Robertson and Harrison were among more than a dozen relatives of victims of officer-involved shootings who gathered in a Southwest Los Angeles park Saturday for a rally sponsored by the Equal Rights Congress.

Since 1979, there have been more than 1,000 such shootings in Los Angeles County, spokesmen for the congress say, citing numbers they say were obtained from the district attorney’s office; and yet there have been only four prosecutions of police officers, said board members Laura Spears and Gerri Silva.

The group claims that innocent people--the preponderance of them young black and Latino men--have been the victims of officers who are too quick to pull the trigger. Their anger is intensified by what they consider the callous treatment of victims’ families.

The Chicago-based group called the rally to present a proposed bill of rights for victims of officer-involved shootings that asks for immediate notification of a death in a “caring and compassionate manner.” The group also asked that family members have the option of viewing bodies of their loved ones before autopsies, and that families be given the right to have an independent pathologist present during autopsies.

The group also called for creation of citizens’ review panels to look into officer-involved shootings, rather than relying solely on police investigations.

“Innocent people are being killed and nothing is being done about it,” Spears said. Countywide, seven unarmed men have been killed by police gunfire since last July, the group said.

Reginald Harrison was shot because he attempted to rob a pizza delivery man who actually was an undercover police officer, said Inglewood Police Officer Steve Chezek. Chezek said that at the time of the shooting there had been a series of armed robberies of pizza delivery men. Harrison had carried a gun the night he was shot, police said.

Officer Chezek said department policy calls for notifying the family of a person shot by a police officer as soon as possible.

Harrison’s mother and sister Annette, however, said police told them that Reginald was carrying a toy gun. The two women said they do not believe that “Reggie” was carrying any gun, or that he was robbing a pizza delivery man.

Enlisted in Army

The two said that Harrison was an ambitious young man who shunned drugs and had never been in trouble previously. Harrison had enlisted in the Army and was scheduled to begin a four-year hitch within a week of his death.

“I just feel that they (the police) got the wrong person,” said Harrison’s mother, a researcher at Rand Corp.

Harrison recalled visiting the coroner’s office the next day, when her son, partially covered with a brown sheet, was among several bodies lying in a crowded room.

“I wasn’t supposed to touch him,” she said softly, “but I touched his face.”

The family of Corey Robinson, 16, said they were not notified until 12 hours later that Robinson had died Sept. 16 after a police raid on a South-Central Los Angeles cocaine “rock house.”

Difficulty Breathing

Police officers said Robinson had fought with police. After he was handcuffed, police said, he had difficulty breathing and collapsed. However, Talibah Shakir, Robinson’s cousin, said she believes that Robinson died as a result of a police beating.

At his funeral, she said, Robinson’s face was swollen and he looked like he had been “hit by a truck.” A spokesman for the Los Angles Police Department could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Mary Robertson said she still does not know why her son was shot. She said she received a bill for $1,254 that said her son had been shot twice in both lungs.

She said she has telephoned deputies to find out why her son was shot and killed, but that she has been unable to get an officer to return her calls.

“All I know is that my son was dead,” she said.