Officer Shot Daughter Despite Pleas, Man Says

A Willowbrook woman had her hands up and was pleading for her life when a transit police officer shot and wounded her in the driveway of her home, the woman’s father said Thursday.

“I told them: ‘You’ve killed my daughter,’ ” Leon Perry, said he told Metropolitan Transportation Authority officers after the shooting Monday. He said he was less then five feet from his daughter Sylvia Bethea when she was shot as she sat in his van.

MTA officers said they saw Bethea, 37, run a stop sign and unsuccessfully attempted to pull her over while chasing her in an unmarked van. They followed her to her home, where the shooting occurred.

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Bethea faces felony charges of evading arrest and is being held in lieu of $165,000 bail at the Twin Towers jail downtown. Her arraignment was postponed until Thursday.

Perry, 60, said he had just finished cutting vegetables in his garden when his daughter frantically pulled into the driveway.

He said he opened a metal gate to let her drive into the backyard when he saw a blue van pull up near the curb about 7:30 p.m. A uniformed transit police officer rushed toward his van, he said.

“He had his gun out and was yelling for both of us to put our hands up,” said Perry. “We both had our hands up. She had her keys in her hand and was saying, ‘Please don’t kill me in front of my mother.’ I said, ‘Please don’t shoot my daughter.’ But he walked up to the window and shot her.”

The officer fired two more shots, hitting Bethea in her left arm, her father said. Perry said he was then handcuffed and taken to a police car, believing his daughter had been killed.

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The officer who fired the shots apparently thought the car keys Bethea held were a weapon, said Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who are investigating the shooting. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said Thursday that MTA officials had not released the names of the officers involved.

As police took Perry into custody, Bethea ran into the house and hid under her bed for nearly two hours before relatives allowed police into the house, family members and authorities said.

Bethea’s mother, Tessie Burton, who is bedridden and paralyzed from an auto accident, said she heard shots and then saw her daughter run into the house.

“She had just pleaded for her life and they shot her anyway,” said Burton, explaining why her daughter hid in her bedroom. “She didn’t have a lot of confidence in the police just then. Would you?”

Perry expressed dismay over the entire incident. “It’s a frightening thing to see a person begging for their life. And when its your daughter . . . Oh, I just don’t believe it. I’ve never seen anything as horrible as that.”