$100-Million Suit Alleges Police Violated Couple’s Rights in Drug Raid : Tujunga: The man, who was shot at least seven times, and his wife claim that there was a cover-up. Narcotics charges were never filed.

Samantha Gersboll was at home with one of her daughters, Elora, recently when a man armed with a lead pipe showed up at her doorstep. He had come angrily, looking for a man named Von and refused to leave when Gersboll told him he had the wrong address.

Frightened, she considered calling the police, but thought again.

“We’re in a position now where we can’t call the police,” she said, sitting in the living room of her Tujunga home. “We really can’t. . . . We just locked all the doors and stood here trembling.”

The last time officers visited the Gersbolls was Jan. 23, 1990, when narcotics detectives armed with a search warrant raided the house in the 9900 block of Tujunga Canyon Boulevard.

By the time it was over, they had shot Gersboll’s husband, John, at least seven times, charged him with assault with a firearm on a police officer, and accused them both of being drug dealers and of possessing illegal weapons.

The couple maintained their innocence and, last month, a San Fernando Superior Court jury acquitted John Gersboll, 41, of assault and Samantha Gersboll, 45, of possession of an illegal weapon. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the same weapons charge against John Gersboll. But last week, a judge dismissed the charge. The two were never charged with possession or sales of drugs.

On Tuesday, the Gersbolls filed a $100-million lawsuit in federal court against the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and several other members of the department, alleging that police officers violated their civil rights during the raid and then engaged in a cover-up to protect the officers.

The FBI is investigating the shooting to determine if the civil rights of the Gersbolls were violated during the raid.

The Gersbolls’ attorney, Vernon C. Jolley, said John Gersboll was prosecuted on assault and weapons charges to provide officers with a means of justifying the shooting.

“What they chose to do is shift the blame and the burden of proof to an innocent man with no regard for his constitutional rights,” Jolley said.

John Gersboll’s attorney in the assault case, Malcolm M. Guleserian, likened it to the Rodney G. King case and called the shooting callous.

“It takes a certain mental state to think you can behave in this fashion,” he said of the police officers’ alleged conduct. Officers are routinely not held “accountable for their actions,” he said.

Shortly after the end of the trial, John Gersboll left the area, fearful of retaliation by police officers. From an undisclosed location, he said the couple never dealt drugs and called the shooting and the trial unwarranted.

“It was a bad shooting right from the beginning and they knew it,” he said. “I was looking at some very hard time for something I did not do.”

As a result of the shooting, John Gersboll was left partially paralyzed in one leg. He suffered a broken pelvis, rib and hip, and must walk with the aid of a cane and brace. Five bullets are still in his body.

Jurors were not allowed to hear information about the source of an anonymous tip that led to the raid, but the Gersbolls said it came from a former boyfriend of one of their daughters, Elaina Burroughs.

“He just hates us,” Samantha Gersboll said. “He’s got a hell of an ax to grind. We’ve had him put in jail repeatedly” for violating a court order for him to stay away from their daughter.

The order did little good, according to the family.

“He absolutely would not leave us alone,” Samantha Gersboll said. He repeatedly appeared at her daughter’s house “yelling and screaming,” she said.

Fearing for their safety, Samantha Gersboll went to the Foothill Division station demanding that officers do something.

“I told every officer who would listen that I was going to blow this guy away,” she recalled. “I’d had it. I was so angry I was practically incoherent.”

On duty that day was a sergeant who was sympathetic and promised to improve officer response time to calls about the man, Samantha Gersboll said.

The sergeant subsequently supervised the man’s arrest on various occasions, Samantha Gersboll said, and later the family and the sergeant grew to be friends. He would frequently visit the Gersboll home and John Gersboll, a gunsmith and car mechanic, worked on the officer’s gun and car, Samantha Gersboll said.

But the friendship did not go unnoticed.

According to court documents, the former boyfriend had his mother call the WeTIP hot line on May 8, 1989, with information that the Gersbolls were dealing drugs and that he had seen the police sergeant there. The lawsuit alleges that Burroughs’ former boyfriend told police that he purchased drugs from the couple.

According to the suit, the man was “in jail at the time and angry at Burroughs for having him arrested.”

Months later, the Gersbolls said, a detective and officers from the Internal Affairs Division visited.

“We invited them in,” she said. They discussed the sergeant and their involvement with him “openly and without hesitation . . . and fully cooperated with the officers in their investigation,” the lawsuit states.

Lt. Fred Nixon, spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, refused to confirm or deny the investigation.

According to the lawsuit, “Internal Affairs closed its file, concluding that the allegations of the informant were false and that the plaintiffs . . . were not involved in any illegal activity.”

Still, narcotics detectives staged a surveillance of the couple’s home in January, 1990, “with knowledge that the . . . investigation by Internal Affairs had revealed no wrongdoing on the part of the plaintiffs,” the lawsuit says.

During the surveillance, police picked up a man who was seen visiting the house. According to officers, he was found with a small amount of methamphetamines.

Based on that incident, the allegations of the ex-boyfriend and detectives’ allegations that numerous people were seen going in and out of the Gersboll house, a judge issued a search warrant Jan. 23, according to the suit.

The lawsuit says all of the information in the search warrant was false. The man found with methamphetamine did go to the Gersboll house but never spoke with anyone inside because they did not hear him knock, the Gersbolls say.

Lt. Gary Rogness, who heads the narcotics bureau and who is a defendant, refused to comment on the incident because of the lawsuit. But Rogness said it was not uncommon for police to begin surveillance of a home based on a tip.

Cmdr. Robert Gil, a police spokesman, said the practice of officers parking and watching a residence where drug dealing is suspected is “standard operating procedure.”

“There aren’t a whole lot of other ways to investigate it,” Gil said.

According to court documents, several narcotics detectives went to the Gersbolls’ home shortly before 11 p.m. and knocked on the door. After receiving no response and hearing movement inside, they knocked in the door with a hand-held battering ram.

Officers Larry Voelker, 43, and David Nila, 42, shot John Gersboll at least seven times, claiming that he pointed a gun at them and refused to stop advancing when ordered to do so. A police investigation found the shooting to be justified.

During the criminal trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Sidney D. Trapp argued that Gersboll pointed the gun at officers to stall them long enough for others in the house to flush drugs down the toilet.

Trapp said in court that Gersboll and the two officers were about five feet apart and that the gun “was pointed right at Voelker’s body.” The officers told Gersboll to drop the gun but he refused and continued advancing, Trapp said, so Voelker and Nila shot him.

But Gersboll testified that he only armed himself because officers banged on the door and did not identify themselves as police even when he asked “Who is it?” Guleserian argued that his client dropped his gun when he realized who they were and was “in a passive position” when shot.

“This man was on the ground in a fetal position,” he said, noting that all but one of the bullets entered through the back of Gersboll’s body.

The lawsuit alleges that the officers shot Gersboll eight times, with seven shots fired from three feet away.

Guleserian theorized that officers overreacted because they thought that they might catch a fellow officer in an illegal activity. The sergeant’s car was parked in the Gersboll’s driveway the night of the raid, but he was not there, he said.

Detectives testified that 0.002 of a gram of methamphetamine was found in Gersboll’s wallet, but Gersboll said he had “no idea” where the drug came from.

Although the trial is over, the couple say they still have not recovered from the physical and emotional damage they say they suffered as a result of the ordeal.

“You feel a lot of outrage but you can’t do anything about it,” Samantha Gersboll said. “You don’t know where to go or who to call. . . . It was very trying.” In spite of the allegations, the shooting, the trial and now the lawsuit, the couple have maintained their faith in the judicial system.

“Our system does work if it’s not misused,” John Gersboll said.

But now they say they must think twice about calling the police, and other people think twice about visiting.

“We used to have a lot of company,” Samantha Gersboll’s daughter, Elora, 21, said as she sat in front of the fireplace. “We’re not popular anymore. People are kind of afraid to come here.”