Lawyers Debate Police Actions in ’90 Restaurant Holdup : Lawsuit: Attorney says officers should have stopped bandits before they entered the Sunland eatery. The defense says procedure was correct.

A special Los Angeles police unit failed in its duty to serve and protect, by watching bandits break into a restaurant where a woman was closing up shop and then stopping patrol officers from responding to her 911 call, a lawyer said Wednesday.

The attorney for the police, meanwhile, countered that the officers followed department procedure and tried to protect the restaurant manager from harm while still apprehending the robbers.

Such were the opposing interpretations of the fatal shooting outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland four years ago, now the subject of a lawsuit filed against the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Christopher Hiddleson, attorney for the restaurant manager, said the Police Department’s Special Investigation Section should have stopped the gun-wielding bandits before they made their way into the McDonald’s the night of Feb. 11, 1990. That way, he said, the robbers never would have tied up his client, Robbin L. Cox, terrorized her and forced her at gunpoint to open the restaurant safe or risk death.

“There was a large amount of force there,” Hiddleson told a six-man, six-woman jury in Glendale Superior Court. “There was a request for assistance, and there was a failure to respond.”

His opening statement was short on detail, Hiddleson said afterward, because he wanted to simply lay out how the robbery occurred and describe the police response, and then let the SIS members’ testimony address the issues of whether they were negligent in allowing the robbery to occur.

“There are specific guidelines” officers should adhere to, Hiddleson said. “They did not follow them in this instance.”

Cox, 26, of Pasadena contends police were negligent when a dispatcher promised to send patrol units to the scene, and that SIS officers then stopped them from coming. She said she has suffered emotional trauma, and contended that the SIS officers allowed the robbery to take place so they could build a case against the four men, who were suspects in a string of similar holdups.

But Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent, representing the city and Police Department, countered that the police were doing their job as best they could when they followed the four men from Venice to the Foothill Boulevard restaurant and watched the robbery unfold.

The four men--three were fatally shot that night by SIS officers--were believed to be carrying loaded weapons. A fourth man was shot and wounded, and later sentenced to 17 years in prison. Police learned after the shooting that the men were actually using pellet guns.

“If they had gone in that night, we might have had a hostage situation and jeopardized everyone involved,” Vincent told the jury.

He said more than 18 of the specially trained SIS officers had surrounded the McDonald’s, and did not stop the men because they had orders to arrest them only after they gathered as a group.

But the suspects fanned out around the building, he said, and some entered from the one blind side where the officers could not see them.

“There was nothing the officers could do at that time, knowing the suspects were armed, or probably armed,” Vincent said.

The FBI continues to investigate the shooting. And it was disclosed Wednesday that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office also is continuing its investigation of the incident.

“We’re probably a couple of months away” from finishing the probe, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Darden said. “There have been shooting investigations that last four years before. That’s not uncommon.”

Former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who has defended the SIS squad’s actions in court depositions, may take the stand as early as today.