Council to Pay $102,000 in Police Shooting

The Los Angeles City Council agreed Tuesday to pay attorney fees and punitive damages for city police in a 7-year-old wrongful death case in which an alleged robber was shot and killed by Los Angeles Police Department Special Investigation Section detectives.

The council responded to a court order awarding $92,000 in legal fees to Stephen Yagman, a Venice attorney, and $10,000 in punitive damages to Johanna Trevino, Yagman’s client, according to the city clerk’s office.

The lawsuit stemmed from a 1990 case in which the detectives shot 21-year-old Javier Trevino--Johanna’s father--in the back of the head through a getaway car’s rear window as he and three accomplices fled a Sunland McDonald’s restaurant the group had just robbed.

Johanna Trevino had not been born when her father was shot and slept on her mother’s lap through much of the trial, which ended in 1995.

Yagman decried Tuesday’s council action, complaining that the officers themselves should have been forced to pay the victim, to teach them a lesson. “A message [has been sent] to the cops that nothing can happen to them,” Yagman said.

The LAPD’s Special Investigation Section, or SIS--a group of surveillance detectives who track career criminals--has been criticized for putting the public at risk by allowing suspects to commit violent crimes before arresting them. Police officials have countered that they lack the necessary evidence to convict such criminals until they commit the crimes.

Last month, in a lethal confrontation with suspected armed robbers that recalled the 1990 McDonald’s case, the SIS drew new criticism when its officers shot and wounded a bystander. Two men and a woman allegedly involved in that robbery ring were killed by the detectives. The wounded bystander, Grover Wilson Smith, has hired Yagman to represent him.

In Johanna Trevino’s case, Yagman had originally been awarded only $25,000, and his client a minimum $1--both of which the council appealed, Yagman said.

But the city’s appeal backfired, according to Yagman, because a federal judge ruled that he was entitled to an additional $92,000 in legal fees and his young client deserved $10,000 in damages.