Through the Looking Glass With the El Monte Police

Imagine the man on the witness stand is accused of killing another man, and has pleaded not guilty, contending that he acted in fear of his own life. The prosecutor asks:

“Sir, you told several versions of what happened that night. Initially, you said you believed the victim had a gun and was about to shoot, and so you shot him first.

“Then you told investigators, Well, he didn’t actually have a gun, but it looked like he was reaching for what could have been a gun, and so you shot him.

“Finally, five days after the incident, we hear from you that the victim’s wife tackled you as the victim appeared to be going for a gun, and you shot him.

“Now sir, which is the truth? Which one, which ones, would you have the jury believe?”

Stop imagining. Now we are in the court of public opinion, hearing similar accounts about the El Monte police SWAT team. The dead man is Mario Paz, the 65-year-old man killed in his underwear when SWAT shot off the locks and burst in an hour before midnight on Aug. 9, looking for drug evidence that wasn’t there.

And you, the public, are the jury. Which version would you be inclined to accept?

Or would you side with Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass Queen, who has sometimes “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”?

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So now there are three written versions, or perhaps three elaborations of one version, of what happened on Aug. 9, when Mario Paz was shot and killed by cops serving a warrant for a drug suspect who had used Paz’s Compton address for his mail.

The first was issued by investigators at 8:45 a.m. on Aug. 10, about nine hours after Paz died. El Monte SWAT officers entered a bedroom of the Paz home and “saw Paz. Believing he was armed with a weapon, one of the officers fired from his duty weapon striking Paz in the upper torso. . . . Detectives recovered several firearms, one of which was loaded, in proximity to suspect Paz.”

The second was issued at 1:20 p.m. on Aug. 26. By then, it had become obvious that the Paz house held no drugs, no evidence of drug trafficking; the dead man was accorded the courtesy of being called “Mr. Paz.”

“Officers ordered [the couple] numerous times in both English and Spanish to comply with their orders. Mr. Paz began to reach toward a dresser drawer on the floor adjacent to him. One of the officers, fearing that he was arming himself, fired two rounds striking Mr. Paz . . . two loaded handguns were found in the dresser drawer on the floor.”

And a coroner’s report released just this week but dated Aug. 14 quotes an El Monte detective as saying that Paz “failed to heed multiple commands from officers to cease his furtive movements and, as the decedents wife tackled the lead officer attempting to control the decedent, appeared to be reaching into an area where a weapon was thought concealed, the decedent was shot by the officer.”

Through the murky grammar, it is clear that . . . nothing is clear.

Tackled? Maria Luisa Paz has said from the first that as she lay on the floor in her underpants, she grabbed an officer’s leg and pleaded for her husband’s life. Why only now do we read, and via the coroner, that police say she “tackled” the sergeant?

Furtive movements? The coroner found that Paz was kneeling at his bedside when he was shot twice in the back. His family’s attorney, Cameron Stewart, says he was reaching not, as police believed, for his guns, which were found in a drawer several feet away, but for the $11,000 savings under his bed, to hand over to the dark-garbed men Paz evidently thought were robbing him.

And court transcripts hint that a videotape of the aftermath of the Paz incident--like a videotape of El Monte police’s search of a storage room belonging to a relative of the real drug suspect--may be blank, says Stewart.

The explanation given in court for the blank storage room video? The foul-up of “an amateur.” How is it, when everybody and his neighbor has a home video camera trained on one another hoping for that $10,000 “funniest home video” moment, that an “amateur” is handling critical police evidence, and bungling it--perhaps twice?

Shades of Rosemary Woods and her ergonomically painful reach to show how she probably erased 18 1/2 crucial minutes of a Nixon Watergate tape.

Shades of Oscar Wilde, who said of parents what could be said of videotapes, that “to lose one is a misfortune, but to lose two smacks of carelessness.”

Honest people make honest mistakes. But there’s an old Russian saying: “He lies like an eyewitness.” Memory is a fragile and fallible and flexible tool. The law, if it is to be a useful tool at all, must be a sturdier one.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.