Elderly Man Fatally Shot in Drug Raid

An elderly man was fatally wounded late Wednesday night when police conducting raids on what they said they believed to be cocaine rock houses stormed his one-bedroom home in South-Central Los Angeles.

Police said the man, L. C. Hadnott, aimed a shotgun at an officer, who shot him in the arm. Hadnott died after surgery at a hospital Thursday. His driver’s license said he was 71, but relatives said he really was 10 years older.

No drugs were found in the home, which police said gang members were using to sell drugs. Police said they had made a drug purchase at the home before seeking a search warrant to storm it. No details of the alleged purchase were disclosed.

Joyce Dobins, a 33-year-old school bus driver who said she lived in the house with Hadnott, her uncle, charged that the retired construction worker did not have a weapon in his hands when he was shot.

“He did not have no gun in his hand, Lord knows he didn’t,” Dobins, still shaking from the raid, told a reporter Thursday. “My uncle was not involved in anything. He was just an old man who stays inside this house. . . . There’s no drugs in here, period.”

One of Three Raided

The tiny house, at 721 E. 49th St., across the street from an elementary school, was one of three raided in the neighborhood by SWAT team officers armed with search warrants. One woman, Pamela Perkins, 26, whom Dobins described as her niece visiting overnight, was booked on suspicion of selling narcotics.

At two other nearby houses, police arrested Ernest Butler, 59, on suspicion of receiving a stolen handgun, and Arthaldia Botiz, 49, on suspicion of cocaine possession.

Lt. William Costleigh, in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s central narcotics bureau, said police have begun seeing more, older people in rock houses. “These rock cocaine dealers are using older people’s houses to alter the appearance of a rock house . . . to give the appearance of an innocent place.”

He said in several raids in the last few months, police have found elderly people on fixed incomes either “coerced or paid off” by drug dealers for the use of their home. Asked if Hadnott was an example of such a trend, he said, “Yes.”

However, Dobins charged Thursday that the police had raided the wrong house. She showed a reporter a copy of the search warrant police left behind, which described the house as having black steel bars on windows. She said the house had had no such bars, and none were visible at the ransacked house Thursday.

She also denied knowing the only suspect identified on the face of the warrant, “Gilbert,” who was described as a 6-foot-4, 300-pound man in his early 20s.

Costleigh asserted that the description on the warrant was accurate, and that “Gilbert” was a suspect reputed to operate at all three homes.

Dobins gave this account of the raid:

She said she and her uncle, who was drinking, were in the bedroom watching television while her niece, Perkins, was in the living room watching another television. They heard footsteps on the porch and Perkins lifted a shade to investigate. She shouted, “ ‘L. C., here come a whole lot of people coming out of cars!’ Then she shot into the kitchen and hid under the table,” Dobins said.

“All we see is bodies flying through the windows,” she continued. She said the police were dressed in khaki and wore black masks “so you can’t see nothing but their eyes.” She said they broke through windows leading into every room in the house, and that she saw one officer grab two guns that she said her uncle kept next to his bed.

She said she joined her niece under the kitchen table and saw her uncle walking backward. “My uncle was backing up, and they said, ‘Don’t move,’ ” she recalled. “He backed up out of the bedroom . . . into the kitchen. He was going to say something.” She said he raised his hands chest high, palms upturned. “They shot him in front of my face.”

A press release issued by LAPD Thursday said Hadnott “refused several commands” by the officers to drop a shotgun he was carrying, then turned and pointed the weapon at Officer Charles Wohlfeiler, 36, a 10-year veteran.

“He (Wohlfeiler) was in fear for his life and fired one round of a 12-gauge shotgun, wounding Hadnott in the left arm,” the release said.

Costleigh said the officers were dressed in dark blue coveralls and were not wearing masks. However, he said, they sometimes pull turtlenecks over their faces to cut down their visibility.