Slain Officer’s Colleagues Become Family to His Widow

Three days after LAPD gang officer Filbert Cuesta was gunned down in an ambush outside a rowdy party, 20 officers who had worked with him assembled before his widow in the family room of her Norwalk home.

One by one the officers introduced themselves to Sylvia Cuesta, each offering a story about her husband, some sad, some funny. Tears flowed when Officer Chris Gomez, who had been injured in an off-duty motorcycle accident, remembered how Cuesta had brought a police radio to Gomez’s hospital room so he could listen to the calls.

The gathering on that night last August was the beginning of a still-tenuous healing process that has pulled together Sylvia Cuesta and the officers who worked with her 26-year-old husband in the Southwest Division’s anti-gang unit.

When Filbert Cuesta died Aug. 9, he became the youngest of the 16 LAPD officers killed in the line of duty since 1990.

His death plunged many fellow officers into despair. Ten members of the closely knit gang detail are seeking promotions or different assignments. Although the unit is known for a high turnover, officers said the ache of Cuesta’s slaying influenced their requests to move on.

Through it all, the officers have reached out to Sylvia Cuesta, 27, and her two daughters, 18-month-old Samantha and 4-month-old Sierra. They check on the family several times a week. They have organized fund-raisers and other tributes. They have celebrated birthdays and invited the family to their homes over the holidays.

“I don’t get a chance to feel sad because when I start to, one of them calls me,” Cuesta said. “They’ve become a part of my family. They’re here for me--not just now, but forever.”

Officers say the effort has helped them work through the crisis too.

Officer Gary Copeland, who was Cuesta’s partner his first year in the gang unit, started compiling an album of clippings and photographs. Now he flips through it whenever he sits alone in his den.

“When his daughters get older,” he said, “it’ll be there to explain to them what kind of guy he was.”

There isn’t a day that Officer Rich Gabaldon, Cuesta’s partner the night of the shooting, doesn’t wear his tributary pin and bracelet, both marking Cuesta’s “end of watch,” his last day in service.

Officer Jody Stiger had ordered 200 of the silver pins, and Officer Freddy Arroyo had ordered dozens of the black aluminum bracelets. The pins, which are the size of two bullets, aren’t authorized by the department and the bracelets sometimes fall off while officers are grabbing gear, but that doesn’t stop them from wearing both.

When not in uniform, many wear Cuesta T-shirts, which feature an anonymous poem on the back:

Step forward now policeman,

You’ve done your burdens well.

Come walk a beat on heaven’s street.

You’ve done your time in hell.

The 200 shirts Officer Damian Velasco ordered are being sold in police stations throughout Los Angeles County.

Southwest Division officers outside the gang detail have pitched in. John Long organized a pool tournament in October, raising $14,000 for the Cuesta family.

Gang officers also gathered together last week to help finish the remodeling that Filbert and Sylvia Cuesta had begun on their two-bedroom house.

A week earlier, the officers volunteered to serve search warrants in the investigation of the latest LAPD killing: the Nov. 29 attack on Pacific Division Officer Brian Brown, shot by a murder suspect near the Los Angeles-Culver City border.

For some, Brown’s death ripped open old wounds.

Sgt. Sam Moreno, the officer in charge in the moments after Cuesta was shot, remembered arriving at the scene.

Cuesta and Gabaldon had called for backup before approaching a house where alleged gang members were noisily celebrating a wedding.

The officers were waiting in their car a few houses away when shots ripped through the back window, taking out the windshield. The second shot hit Cuesta in the back of the head. Shots continued. Gabaldon sprang from the car and ran around to Cuesta’s side.

He tried to staunch Cuesta’s head wound. With his free hand, he grabbed the radio.

“Officer needs help!” he yelled desperately. “Officer down!”

Seconds later, Cuesta’s pulse stopped. Gabaldon gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Soon, Officer Rosemary Piazza was at his side. When Gabaldon asked for a towel to help hold back the bleeding, she ripped off her shirt and tied it around Cuesta’s head.

Moreno can’t stop picturing the bloody scene he encountered. “It was scary when I realized we had to get him to the hospital, when I realized we had to respond.”

Cuesta never regained consciousness. One man was later arrested and charged.

In the days that followed, many officers in Southwest’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unit floundered as they tried to get back into their work routine.

“I put them all on inside duty--I didn’t want them working,” said Steve Grenier, the lieutenant who oversaw the unit until his retirement last month.

They introduced themselves to Sylvia Cuesta as a group on that painful night in her living room. There were tears, but there was laughter too when Copeland remembered how Cuesta had stalled a drug raid by announcing just before officers were to ram through the front door of a house that he had to use the restroom.

The evening “was beautiful,” said Officer Don Poirier, who had carpooled to work nearly every day with Cuesta, sharing stories about their newborn babies.

Some officers helped Sylvia make funeral arrangements. Some went to counseling. An officer always sat in front of Cuesta’s house in case Sylvia needed someone.

When the officers finally went back to the streets a week after the killing, Sgt. Moreno, worried that some might take their anger out on suspects, limited them to writing descriptions of what they observed; the business of making arrests or conducting raids was temporarily handed off to others.

“I told them I was going to seem overprotective for a while, but to bear with it,” Moreno said. “You’re useless to the department if you go out there and are heavy-handed.”

Still, the hurt persisted.

“I wasn’t working with the same enthusiasm,” Gabaldon said. “I felt some part of me was not there, that it had died with me in the car with my partner.”

He and several others sought new assignments.

“I just want to go and do different things,” Gabaldon said. “A lot of us want to put this behind us.”

Moreno transferred to an administrative section, in part because another tragedy within the unit would be too painful to take.

For some officers, Brian Brown’s death provided an unexpected opportunity for closure.

Gabaldon has given his phone number to Brown’s surviving partner, Francisco Dominguez. It’s still too fresh in his mind, Gabaldon said, but if Dominguez were to call, he knows what he would say.

He would tell his brother officer that the endless despair is OK. He would share details of how he coped--the weeks he spent running alone along South Bay beaches, the restless nights, the friendships outside law enforcement he tried to make stronger.

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to feel, how to react,” Gabaldon said. “I want to assure him he did all he could.

“If there’s anything positive that I can think of, it’s that we can share from our experiences of what it’s like.”