D.A. Vindicates 2 Anaheim Officers in Fatal Shooting

Three months after a Costa Mesa man was shot and killed during a police chase, district attorney’s officials said Thursday that the Anaheim officers involved are blameless.

The family of Ricky Edward Strickland, 32, a convicted car thief, and its attorneys reacted bitterly to the district attorney’s decision to clear the officers in the Dec. 27 shooting but said they weren’t surprised.

Law enforcement officials “never indict one of their own,” said an emotional Harriet Strickland of Santa Ana, the mother of the victim. “These police love parolees . . . . And the D.A.’s office has given them a license to kill.”

Ricky Strickland, driving a new truck his grandmother had given him for Christmas, allegedly tried to run over two officers in an Anaheim parking lot when they tried to question him about a stolen vehicle. Strickland then led police on a chase. It ended in Garden Grove, when Strickland rammed into a police car at a barricade in a residential neighborhood and then ran.

As police ran after him, they saw him reach for something in his waistband, the officers said afterward during the investigation. Thinking it might be a gun, they said, officers opened fire.

With the investigation closed this week, Strickland family attorneys in Anaheim said they plan to file a lawsuit against the cities of Anaheim and Garden Grove--the two police agencies involved--within a week to 10 days.

The Strickland shooting capped a record year in Orange County for officer-involved shootings. In 1990, local peace officers killed or wounded 29 people with gunfire, nearly triple the number of three years ago.

The district attorney’s office, which investigates all such shootings, has not found any of the officers involved culpable.

Attorney Sunil Brahmbhatt said that Strickland was shot “in the back for no reason.” He said: “This case is the Rodney King of Orange County.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis R. Rosenblum, who handled the investigation, said the public often has the wrong impression about police shootings.

“When I look at these cases,” Rosenblum said in an interview, “I try to see it as the officers do. You’re sitting in a car and you see a convicted felon ram into a police car--how long do you want to wait to see what he’s going to do? How many chances do you give him? . . . “You can’t ask (the officers) who have to make a split-second decision to run after these guys and knock them down. It’s not practical. If the guy starts to make a move, they have to do something.”

Rosenblum said Strickland was shot three or four times--two of the bullets apparently fatal--in the back, the back of the leg and near the left ear. The shots were fired by Anaheim Sgt. Harold Parkison and Officer Cliff Morris.

The district attorney’s office, citing the statements of officers and some witnesses at the scene, concluded that Strickland did reach for his waistband as he fled the crash.

No weapon was ever found.

Anaheim Police Chief Joseph T. Molloy, informed of the district attorney’s decision in a letter this week, said: “As far as we’re concerned, this matter is closed.”

Garden Grove Police Chief John Robertson, who got a district attorney’s letter Thursday, said: “It was a lawful shooting.”

After the shooting, several witnesses told The Times that they never saw Strickland reach for anything and that he was merely running away when shot. But Rosenblum maintained that some of the people who gave such published statements later changed parts of their stories in police interviews.

Strickland was killed less than a mile from the alcohol rehabilitation center where he had been living as a condition of his 1989 parole on a stolen property conviction. And at the time of his death he worked at a construction firm, family members said.

Harriet Strickland said that to authorities “it’s like Ricky never existed and this never took place. It was like a joke to them.”