School Police Officer Fatally Shot at Home

A five-year veteran of the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department was fatally shot inside his home Wednesday night, becoming the second officer in the 300-member force to be killed, albeit off-duty.

Although the slaying of 32-year-old Joel Andrew Shanbrom was initially described as the apparent result of a home-invasion robbery, sources in the school police and the Los Angeles Police Department said later they were also looking at the business dealings and personal relationships of the victim.

“I knew him to be a good officer, a family man, a very pleasant personality,” School Police Chief Wesley Mitchell said Thursday.

Detectives with the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division declined to discuss their investigation. The team of specialists was summoned from LAPD headquarters downtown by detectives in the neighborhood Devonshire Division police station, in part because Shanbrom was a peace officer.

But sources who asked not to be named also said the case presented many questions. No potential murder weapon was found immediately after the shooting. In addition, they said, nothing appeared to be missing from the rented home in the 17900 block of Raymer Street that Shanbrom shared with his wife, Jennifer, and their 3-year-old son, Jacob.

The crime was not reported for two hours, sources said, when Shanbrom’s mother-in-law returned home from dinner and the movies and discovered his body about 9:30 p.m.

Jennifer Shanbrom told investigators she had locked herself and her son in a second-story bathroom after hearing a shot fired about 7:30 p.m. and remained there in terror, sources said.

A next-door neighbor, meanwhile, said she and her husband heard no barking by the street’s many dogs around the time of the incident.

*

“Next door there are three dogs, on the other side there are two more dogs. If there’s a raccoon, they bark. If there’s a possum, they bark. There was no barking,” said neighbor Barbara Romey, who said she may have heard at least two gunshots but assumed the sounds were her husband’s rustling around the kitchen.

School police were interviewing their own members Thursday in an effort to determine whether Shanbrom’s police work may be connected to his death.

Shanbrom’s father and brother, who gave statements to police at the LAPD’s Devonshire station Thursday afternoon, praised the 6-foot-2, 225-pound officer as a “gentle giant” who loved his wife and son and had high ambitions.

His brother, James Shanbrom, said he and his family had attended a Purim festival at a local synagogue last Sunday.

“In the last couple of months we connected so well together,” James Shanbrom said. “I felt a closeness that I had never felt with him before.”

James Shanbrom also said his younger brother had enrolled in an MBA program at Cal State Northridge and planned to attend in the fall. “He told me he wanted to be chief of police someday,” he said.

Joel and Jennifer Shanbrom also ran a part-time financial planning business and contracted with Primerica Financial Services, based in Duluth, Ga., during 1996-97.

Primerica Senior Vice President Mark Supic said the couple generated only $2,000 for the company, after which they terminated their contract voluntarily.

The Shanbroms continued to do financial planning work, however, and went into business with Joel Shanbrom’s older sister, Raquel Shanbrom of Culver City. He also offered financial advice to his fellow officers at the school district. The couple moved late last year from Palmdale to Northridge.

“Every time I talked to him, he asked if I was saving for the future,” recalled Russ Orlando, a Police Academy classmate and one of Shanbrom’s closest friends. “He told me, ‘You have to look out for your family and be prepared.’ ”

Shanbrom was hired by the school Police Department in July 1993. He graduated from the Rio Hondo Police Academy in Whittier. He took a six-month training assignment in January 1994 at Horace Mann Middle School in South Los Angeles.

He spent the remainder of his career in the Valley--serving as a resident officer at Polytechnic High in Sun Valley and Kennedy High in Granada Hills before arriving at his most recent assignment as a patrol officer in the Verdugo Hills complex including Verdugo Hills High School, Mount Gleason Middle School and six elementary schools.

Administrators at the campuses recalled Shanbrom as a kind police officer who always made time for children.

“Wonderful officer,” recalled Pinewood Elementary Principal Esther Macias. “He was never in a rush, never acted as if something you reported was trivial. He was very understanding and would take a lot of time and talk to children as if they really mattered. He didn’t try to scare them or bully them, but to explain things to them.”

*

Macias recalled that Shanbrom visited the campus on Wednesday at her request to help defuse tensions between Latino and Armenian students who were calling each other names.

Shanbrom spoke to the children, emphasizing the need to be sensitive and get along with one another.

Macias planned to break the news today to her staff, which has a pupil-free day. But she was not looking forward to Monday.

“I don’t know how we are going to tell the children.”