FBI to Probe Police Shootout at Robbery

An attorney said Wednesday that the FBI has granted his request for a civil rights investigation into the controversial Los Angeles Police Department unit that killed one man and wounded another last year after the pair robbed a Newbury Park liquor store.

Attorney Stephen Yagman said that the FBI will probe into the actions of the LAPD Special Investigations Section on June 26, 1995, when 13 officers engaged in a shootout that wounded Robert Cunningham of Reseda and killed Daniel Soly of West Hills.

Yagman pointed to a letter dated Tuesday he received from Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael J. Gennaco that states, “We have requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to initiate an investigation into the shooting incident.”

Yagman said he requested the investigation five days earlier--and three months after he filed a suit in federal court accusing the officers of shooting Cunningham with shotguns and handguns in an attempt to kill him.

“I’m not at all surprised that [the FBI] acted on it virtually instantaneously,” he said.

FBI official Robert Ellis declined to comment Wednesday evening on the case. LAPD officials could not be reached Wednesday evening for comment.

The unit often engages in the controversial practice of tailing known felons to catch them in the act of committing a crime.

On the night of June 26, special investigations officers in unmarked cars tailed Cunningham and Soly from Los Angeles County to South West Liquor & Deli in Newbury Park.

They allegedly watched the pair pull bandannas over their mouths, draw pistols and storm into the store. There, the robbers forced the cashier to empty the till and sprinted from the store with their arms full of cigarette cartons, according to police.

It was not until the men reached their car that police moved in, prompting a ferocious gun battle that left Soly, 26, dead and Cunningham and two special investigations officers wounded. Cunningham, 32, is awaiting trial in Ventura County on charges of murder for his alleged role in the gunfight.

The FBI probe is not the first into the controversial SIS unit.

Officers of the LAPD unit killed three robbers in a 1990 shootout after the trio held up a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland.

The FBI investigated that case, but no charges were filed.

However, that shooting led to a 1992 civil suit filed by Yagman, who won a court order requiring that officers pay more than $44,000 in damages from their own pockets to the dead men’s families.

A 1988 investigation by The Times found that the 19-member unit often followed violent criminals but did not arrest them until after they committed robberies or burglaries--frequently leaving victims terrorized or injured.