Police Question Actions of Slain Officer During Raid

A day after the leader of an Oxnard SWAT team shot and killed a fellow officer, police officials suggested that tactical mistakes by the dead officer may have contributed to the tragedy.

After poring over details of the devastating accident, officers who oversee the Oxnard department’s Special Weapons and Tactics unit said the inquiry is primarily focused on the actions of Officer James Rex Jensen Jr., who was fatally shot early Wednesday by veteran Sgt. Daniel Christian during a drug raid.

They said they question Jensen’s actions as he led a 12-officer team into a suspected drug dealer’s south Oxnard condominium, up a staircase and into a hallway, where he was shot.

They are also reevaluating the wisdom of an assault plan that required Jensen to hurl a deafening, smoky “flash-bang” diversionary grenade in the hallway seconds before Christian fired the fatal shotgun blasts.

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Assistant Oxnard Police Chief Stan Myers, who oversees the SWAT unit, said it could be weeks before the department rules on the causes of the shooting. But an interim report is expected to be forwarded to the district attorney’s office for review by Wednesday, officials said.

“Right now we don’t know if there was a mistake of tactics or a mistake of the mind,” he said.

But Myers said he suspects that Jensen may have committed “an error in procedure” that contributed to his death. “That would be the probability,” he said.

Officials said the young officer was shot up to three times in the side of his chest shortly after he threw the diversionary grenade from the staircase, raced into the hallway and then into an adjacent bedroom--only to quickly return to a hall doorway.

Although only a few feet away, Christian could not identify his partner--a close friend and protege--through the smoke and mistook him for an armed suspect, officials said. Jensen said nothing to the sergeant before he was shot, officials said.

“A major question,” Myers said, is why Jensen did not stay in the bedroom and hold that position. He said there were plenty of officers to search the rest of the small, unoccupied two-bedroom condo where police expected to find three armed suspects, but which was empty.

“Probably the main focus of our investigation right now is to figure that out,” said Myers, who was a SWAT team member for 16 years before leaving the unit in 1991.

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“There are instances where an officer could come out of one room and go to a secondary one,” Myers said. “But this would be when there are rooms beyond the number of officers.”

Myers said he was not intimately familiar with the assault plan used by the team during the early-morning raid--one of 16 in five cities against a major county cocaine and methamphetamine ring.

But Oxnard Cmdr. John Crombach, who directed Wednesday’s raids in his city, said Jensen should have stayed in the first bedroom and held that position, reducing possible confusion in the hallway.

“The plan didn’t call for Jim to come out,” he said. “I don’t know why [he did], and unfortunately I don’t think we’re ever going to know that.”

Crombach said Jensen made a second questionable move by charging too quickly up the staircase, leaving behind all the other officers, including Christian, his partner in a two-man “cell” that was supposed to work as a team. That quick movement severed visual and verbal contact, Crombach said.

“There was apparently some distance established between Jim and the rest of the team,” he said. “You work in cells, and this was not the way it was supposed to go down.”

The raid was well-planned and executed, Crombach maintained. “If we were going to do this operation tomorrow, it would be executed the same,” he said. “But there would be an emphasis on staying together. You don’t move too fast. . . . And you clear and hold [positions in each room].”

Crombach said, however, that a third problem may also have contributed to the shooting--use of the grenade in such close quarters.

“This is an excellent tool. We know what it does. And the everyday crooks on the street do not know,” he said. “But smoke is emerging to be an issue here. We may have to do some reevaluation of instruments used under those circumstances.”

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One key to understanding precisely what happened may be provided when Christian is up to being fully debriefed on the shooting, investigators said. They said they are waiting until he is strong enough emotionally to talk at length.

Even as Oxnard grieved its loss and pondered the cause of the tragedy, other Southern California police agencies considered the lessons of the rare officer-shooting-officer incident.

“We obviously will be in touch with them for purposes of evaluating the situation and seeing what could have been done differently,” said Lt. Ray Baytos, who directs SWAT training for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Baytos’ department, which trains officers from Oxnard and dozens of other agencies, said he did not know what went wrong. But the key question is whether Jensen and Christian followed their assault plan.

“They probably had a working knowledge of what the interior of the place looked like. Oftentimes, we will even plan our movements,” he said. “I’m sure all of that was in place in Oxnard, because they have a very good reputation.”

Baytos also noted the disorienting effects of the “flash bang” grenade. “They are very bright and very loud and the smoke is dense, so it can disorient not only the suspect but the officer. So you have to be very circumspect in deploying them.”

Oxnard seems to have used the grenade appropriately, he said, since officers were expecting to encounter armed and dangerous drug dealers. “This would be a time where they would be used,” he said.

The Ventura County shooting shocked and disturbed many experienced Los Angeles police officers, who tried to fathom how the involved officers’ tactics could have gone so tragically awry. Some called to express condolences to the Oxnard department, and many puzzled over the known facts of the incident.

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According to some officers, the Oxnard team’s use of flash-bang explosive devices should not have led to confusion and disorientation by the police. “If they’re well-trained and conversant with their equipment, that shouldn’t happen,” one officer said.

Several officers stressed that in the heat of an incident, events happen with stunning speed. Decisions have to be made instantaneously, often in smoky or poorly lit rooms amid extraordinary confusion and danger.

“When things happen, they happen so quickly,” said one police officer. “We expect humans to act in nanoseconds, and then we spend months trying to figure out what went wrong.”

The shooting of Jensen was only the second fatal incident involving one officer shooting another in Southern California this decade.

The first was an Orange County sheriff’s deputy who was shot by a fellow officer during an impromptu training exercise on Christmas Day 1993, an incident that also served as a costly lesson on safety to local law enforcement agencies.

In the months following the death of Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins, police agencies reexamined and reemphasized their policies regarding firearms and field training.

The shooting by Brian P. Scanlan, a field training deputy who has since retired, sparked allegations of gross misconduct and racism because Scanlan is white and Robins African American. The Orange County Grand Jury and the Justice Department, however, found no criminal wrongdoing.

Scanlan was placed on paid leave after the shooting and was granted a service-connected disability retirement in January 1995.

The county has proposed settling wrongful death claims filed by Robins’ wife, his 3-year-old daughter and his mother, with an agreement that could pay the family nearly $5 million over their lifetimes.

Staff writers Jim Newton and Anna Cekola reported from Los Angeles and Orange County.