U.S. Probing LAPD Conduct in Killings : Sunland: Grand jury is investigating a squad of officers who waited outside a restaurant during a robbery, then shot the armed bandits as they exited.

A federal grand jury is reviewing the actions of Los Angeles police officers for possible violations of federal civil rights laws when they killed three robbers and wounded a fourth after a Sunland restaurant holdup, sources said Monday.

At least seven police officers have been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, which is expected to hear evidence for the remainder of this month and into early February, several lawyers and law-enforcement sources said.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined any comment Monday, citing the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings.

But other sources said a federal probe of the incident has been quietly pending for some time, and was recently reactivated because the statute of limitations would prevent filing civil rights charges after Feb. 12, the fifth anniversary of the shooting.

Nine members of the LAPD’s elite SIS or Special Investigations Section were involved in the incident, in which four armed robbers where showered with bullets as they fled an early-morning heist at a McDonald’s restaurant.

Officers said the robbers pointed guns at them. The weapons turned out to be air pistols.

The thieves had been under SIS surveillance for a string of similar holdups, and critics noted that the police waited for them and watched outside the McDonald’s instead of trying to help the lone employee inside.

A lawyer for the robbers’ survivors, Stephen Yagman, has referred to the nine SIS officers in civil suits as “murderers” and members of an LAPD “death squad” that ambushed the fleeing thieves.

A federal court jury awarded more than $44,000 to Yagman’s clients in 1992 and specified that the officers and then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates should pay for the damages out of their own pockets rather than have the city pay the judgments, which is the norm in such cases.

When the Los Angeles City Council voted to pay for the damages anyway with public funds, Yagman filed suit again on behalf of one of the slain robbers’ daughters, Johanna Trevino, now 4.

The Trevino complaint alleges that City Council members fostered a policy of police brutality by routinely paying court judgments levied against officers sued in police misconduct cases and argues that the council members should be held personally liable for damages for their votes in the McDonald’s and similar cases.

The potentially precedent-setting civil suit is pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, and the trial is scheduled to begin Feb. 6.

In the separate grand jury investigation, some but not all of the subpoenaed police officers are current or former members of the SIS, but none was directly involved in the 1990 shooting, sources said.

The officers actually involved in the incident--as the probe’s presumed targets--cannot legally be ordered to testify before the grand jury, and sources said that so far none have been invited to appear voluntarily, either.