LAPD Officers Tailed Suspects Before Shooting : Robbery: Detectives of controversial unit followed the pair across Ventura County line without notifying local authorities, officials say.

Cruising for a target, two robbery suspects pulled up to a Ventura County liquor store Monday night, apparently unaware that 13 members of a heavily armed, elite Los Angeles police squad were shadowing them in V-8-powered, undercover cars.

Police waited. They watched the pair park their small white Toyota on a dark side street, tug bandannas over their mouths, draw pistols and barge into the South West Liquor & Deli in Newbury Park.

Stock boy Julio Recinos said the pair grabbed his hair, shoved his head onto the counter and forced the cashier to empty the till. But only after the suspects grabbed cigarette cartons and sprinted most of the 100 yards back to their car did police move in, said Ventura County sheriff’s deputies.

Then began a ferocious gun battle that killed one suspect, left the other fighting for his life and badly wounded two detectives from LAPD’s controversial Special Investigations Section (SIS), police said.

Daniel Soly, 27, of West Hills died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head, said Ventura County coroner’s autopsy assistant James Baroni. Robert Cunningham, 26, of Reseda, Soly’s alleged accomplice, was in critical condition in the intensive care unit of Pleasant Valley Hospital, an official there said. He suffered four gunshot wounds.

And two SIS detectives, whom LAPD officials refused to identify, remained in serious but stable condition at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

One, a 40-year-old man, underwent surgery for a bullet that hit his abdomen below his bulletproof vest, tore through his bladder and exited through his back, said hospital spokeswoman Kris Carraway.

The other, a 49-year-old man, underwent surgery to remove shrapnel that pierced his abdomen after a bullet splattered against his vest, she said.

LAPD Chief Willie Williams visited the officers and then the crime scene Tuesday just after midnight, where technicians collected shell casings and other evidence from around the suspects’ bullet-riddled Toyota.

“Both our officers are in real good shape,” Williams told reporters. “I talked with one, and he was in good spirits. He said he was ready to get up and leave the hospital, but I told him to take it easy. . . . Both men were very, very lucky.”

The officers followed the robbery suspects across the county line without notifying local authorities, but Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter said he was not bothered by the lapse. Nor that the officers waited to move in until after the clerk was robbed.

Carpenter commended LAPD for combatting robbery in the Thousand Oaks area--a sheriff’s jurisdiction that for several years has been plagued by armed robbers from neighboring Los Angeles County.

“In a perfect world, I’d rather that had not happened,” Carpenter said Tuesday. “But this isn’t a perfect world. . . . If [SIS] had not been following [the robbers], one of them would not have been shot to death and the other would not have been wounded, and they would be out committing robberies today.”

On Tuesday, Ventura County authorities began investigating the shooting. Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Holmes said his office might file a murder charge against Cunningham for his role in events that led to Soly’s death. And sheriff’s detectives began piecing together the events.

About 50 yellow plastic markers peppered the scene, pointing out shell casings, shotgun wadding, buckshot pellets and other particles of evidence for the police photographer.

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The markers surrounded the suspects’ late ‘70s Toyota Celica, which was sandwiched between the noses of two unmarked SIS cars--a late-model, brown Chevy Camaro and a new, maroon Ford Thunderbird.

The Celica’s doors hung open, the windows on the ground in glittering shards. The back windows were almost completely blown out by gunfire. And at least one bullet hole could be seen on the Thunderbird’s windshield frame.

The shooting occurred across Hillcrest Drive from Ventura County Fire Department Station 35, where Capt. Larry Brister was doing paperwork.

“I thought it to be a car backfiring, and then I heard multiple gunshots and I saw multiple flashes, and the shadows of individuals running,” he said. “I hit the floor and shut the lights off.”

After the gunfire ended, an LAPD officer in a raid jacket pounded on the station door, asking for medical help for an officer down, Brister said.

Brister said his crew went out to tend to one of the officers, and he summoned two more county fire crews and three ambulances for the other officer and Cunningham.

Soly was at the wheel when the shooting began, but it is not clear whether he drew his gun or pointed it at the officers before he was shot to death, said Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Robertson.

SIS officers have told investigators that Cunningham popped up through the sunroof to shoot at them with a .357 magnum revolver before they returned fire, he said.

“We know that several shots were fired over a period of about 20 seconds,” he said. But it is not clear yet who shot whom, he said.

SIS officers have long been criticized for their tactic of watching violent crimes occur before making an arrest.

A 1988 investigation by The Times found that the 19-member unit often followed violent criminals but did not take advantage of opportunities to arrest them until after robberies or burglaries occurred--in many cases leaving victims terrorized or injured.

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The LAPD lost a 1992 civil suit in which a federal jury found that SIS members had wrongfully shot three robbers to death after they held up a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland in 1990. The court ordered the police to pay more than $44,000 in damages from their own pockets to the dead men’s families.

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors cited insufficient evidence and declined to file charges against the officers after a lengthy probe of alleged civil rights violations in the shootings.

But a U.S. grand jury is said to be nearing the end of its investigation into whether some officers participated in a police cover-up and lied in court during that trial.

Despite the criticism of the SIS unit, the owner of the store robbed Monday night praised the elite squad’s decision to wait to move in until after the crime.

“They did the right job,” said Hakam Barakat, owner of the South West Liquor & Deli. “If they would have stepped in before it happened or at the time it happened, it would have been a big mess in the store, and more people would have been shot and killed.”

Lt. Robertson of Sheriff’s Department agreed.

“You don’t always know where the suspect is going to take you, and you don’t know if you’re going to cross into another jurisdiction,” he said. If LAPD officers planned to cross into Ventura County and failed to warn local deputies, he said, “That would be an issue. But we don’t have any bones of contention at this point.”

Meanwhile, the LAPD sought to distance the officers from the SIS, insisting in a press release that the detectives worked instead for the Detective Support Division.

At the crime scene, Chief Williams refused to discuss the SIS or even confirm that the officers involved were members of it.

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However, an SIS detective confirmed that his unit, which is part of the support division, was involved in the shootout.

“It’s a moral outrage,” said Venice civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, a longtime SIS critic who sued the LAPD on behalf of the slain Sunland suspects’ families.

“The idea of police not performing their primary and most important function of protecting the citizenry is contrary to every notion of appropriate police work,” he said. “Any right-thinking person ought to be dismayed and astonished by what’s going on.”

However, Thousand Oaks civic leaders were reluctant to criticize the Los Angeles police.

Councilwoman Judy Lazar said she was surprised that Ventura County law enforcement agencies were not informed of the operation, but added that perhaps the lack of communication was appropriate under the circumstances.

“You have to assume that these agencies know what they are doing,” Lazar said. “They couldn’t do anything until the crime was committed.”

Mayor Jaime Zukowski praised the police and said she hopes Monday’s robbery will spur the city to hasten plans for increased police protection.

“We are proud of our status as the second safest city in the nation,” Zukowski said. “But we have to realize that we are vulnerable to the risks of the large metropolitan area next door.”

Times staff writers Sara Catania and Dwayne Bray, correspondents Ira E. Stoll and Andrew Blechman and photographer Scott Harrison contributed to this report.