Police Shooting of Runaway, 15, Is Questioned

A 15-year-old runaway shot by police after she repeatedly rammed a stolen van into an unmarked but occupied police car remained in critical condition Saturday, as some raised questions about the officers’ use of force.

The girl and a 14-year-old passenger--who was not injured in the shooting--had fled from a girls’ group home in Riverside County and were driving a white minivan stolen from a related group home for boys, police said.

Officers spotted the van in a strip mall parking lot near Ball Road and Moody Street shortly after 11 a.m. Friday. The girls approached the parked van and were ordered to stop, but police say they refused. Instead, they climbed in the van and floored it in reverse, Cypress Police Sgt. John Avila said.

The van repeatedly struck an unmarked car with a detective inside before officers opened fire, Avila said. Authorities were justified in shooting because the life of the detective and everyone else in the area was threatened, he said.

“You have a small strip shopping mall, with a busy liquor store, and it’s getting close to noon,” Avila said. “There’s any number of people who are in danger once a driver commits to that type of activity. You have the officers who are out there on foot and all the other pedestrians. All of a sudden everyone else was at risk.”

But Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina and one of the nation’s foremost critics on deadly force, said officers might have been able to avert the shooting if they had prevented the girls from getting in the van.

The danger to the lives of officers and surrounding pedestrians should be “imminent” to justify a shooting, he added.

“You have to ask about the strategy, and you have to ask about the imminent risk,” he said. “Just because you think someone’s going to be at risk because someone else is driving off recklessly isn’t enough of a reason to justify deadly force.”

Staff members at a Riverside County boys’ home run by Santa Ana-based Family Solutions discovered the white GMC Safari minivan missing about 12:30 a.m. Friday, said agency executive director John Peel.

Family Solutions runs 13 small group homes, seven for girls and six for boys. The homes--10 of which are in Orange County--house children ages 7 to 18 who have been abused or neglected by their parents, Peel said.

A bed check at the home where the van disappeared showed all the boys were present. Peel said that by law, he could not say whether the teenage girls lived at one of the agency’s homes, but police confirmed the girls lived there. The agency’s other home in Riverside County is for girls, Peel said.

Group home officials believed that one of the girls had ties to the Cypress area and notified police Friday, Avila said.

A detective in an unmarked car found the van parked outside the Cypress strip mall and called in additional police cars to seal off the area and approach the girls, Avila said.

“Uniformed officers arrived on the scene and ordered them to stop, but they didn’t,” Avila said. “They got back into the van and tried to drive away.”

Officers fired an unknown number of times, police said.

Avila said the 14-year-old passenger was “a very lucky girl” for escaping injury. She was in custody Saturday at Orange County Juvenile Hall for possession of stolen property. The driver remained under 24-hour police guard at Los Alamitos Medical Center, said Cypress Sgt. Ron Dixon. She was on a respirator after undergoing surgery.

“I think she’s going to make it,” Dixon said. “She’s young.”

Dixon said the girl’s grandparents have been allowed to visit her.

Peel said when he first learned that police shot at a 15-year-old girl in one of his agency’s vans, he expected “that there was a weapon or something involved.”

But Cypress Sgt. Ray Peterson told him that the girl did not have a gun, Peel said. Peterson “basically just indicated that the police feared for their lives,” Peel said.

Peel said he found the police account troubling because it appeared the officers could have recovered the vehicle without shooting anyone.

“When the unmarked police car came to our van the first time there was nobody in it,” Peel said. “Somehow we went from a place where we had a cop at our vehicle and everything was fine to the shooting. They waited until the people came back and got in the van and surrounded it.

“I just find it hard to believe that it’s the only alternative in those cases,” Peel said. “Somehow it just seems that should have some other sort of intervention.”

Countered Dixon, of the Cypress police:

“No matter what happens, a bunch of people are going to say that there were alternatives, and those were all people who weren’t there.”

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Binh Ha Hong.