Survivor of 2nd Shooting Says He Was Framed

The survivor of a second controversial police shooting being investigated by local and federal authorities said in an interview Friday that officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division shot him in the back and killed his friend, then tried to frame him by saying he pulled a gun on them.

The allegations by Jose Perez, an inmate at the Men’s Central Jail awaiting trial on unrelated charges, mirror those that have surfaced in another shooting and that led to the release from prison Thursday of a man convicted of assaulting the police officers. Authorities now say he was framed.

Perez said he was surprised in court by the allegation that he had a gun when he was shot and a friend was killed in July 1996--an incident that a former LAPD officer has identified as “dirty.” That ex-officer, Rafael A. Perez, provided the information as part of a plea bargain in his cocaine theft case.

Jose Perez said he was unarmed when he was shot and that the police lied.

Police documents also say Perez was shot in the chest, but Perez said he was shot in the back and he showed reporters two round scars just below his left shoulder blade that seemed to support his account.

Though he maintained his innocence, Perez--acting on the advice of counsel--decided to plead guilty to assault on a police officer because he faced life in prison if convicted under California’s felony murder law, which held him criminally liable for the death of his alleged accomplice at the hands of police. In exchange for his plea, his sentence was established as the 10 months he already had served in jail.

“[The lawyer] asked me if I wanted to take a deal,” Perez said. “It sounded good. They’re offering me freedom instead of a life sentence. Of course I didn’t want to do life.”

Perez said he believes that police framed him to cover up an improper shooting.

“I got shot in the back and my homeboy got killed. They have to make a story out of it,” Perez said. “I didn’t have a gun. I was on the floor, bleeding . . . and they handcuffed me. I wasn’t even running. I was walking. They said I was pointing a gun at them. But I didn’t even have a gun. Neither me or my homeboy ever shot a gun. We just liked to party.”

Faced with the worst LAPD scandal in six decades, federal and state authorities say they are investigating this and other alleged abuses by Rampart officers.

Perez said authorities have not contacted him in the downtown jail, where he is awaiting trial on charges that stem from an unrelated shooting incident in September 1998.

Richard Rosenthal, a deputy Los Angeles district attorney involved in the investigation, said he could not comment on Perez’s allegations, which are strikingly similar to those of Javier Francisco Ovando.

Ovando was released from prison Thursday after Rafael Perez told police that he and his partner, Nino Durden, lied when they said they had shot Ovando after he burst in on them with a weapon in October 1996. Ovando says police handcuffed him, shot him in the head and planted the gun.

Officer Perez was at Shatto Place the night Jose Perez and his friend were shot there and has alleged that that incident, too, was “dirty,” sources say. Sources say authorities are looking into the possibility that officers planted the weapons on the suspects in both cases.

Three of the officers who were at the scene of the Shatto Place incident have been relieved of duty since the corruption investigation began, and another was fired earlier this year in connection with the alleged beating of a handcuffed man inside the Rampart station. A total of 12 LAPD officers have been relieved of duty or forced to leave the department since the investigations began.

“If there are other allegations made, we’ll make sure they are investigated,” Rosenthal said. “In the Ovando allegations, the information was of such a nature that we needed to take immediate action. So we did.”

Jose Perez is a small-statured 22-year-old covered with tattoos that include the emblem of the 18th Street gang, which he says he joined five years ago.

He says he emigrated from Mexico at 3 but his family later returned to care for his grandmother. He has an 18-month-old daughter, Elizabeth Guisselle, who sometimes visits him with his girlfriend.

The night he was shot, Perez said, he went to an apartment building in the 600 block of South Shatto Place to place flowers at a shrine memorializing two gang members who had been shot there the day before.

The police account paints a very different picture. It says that “two men with guns were possibly readying for retaliation over the gang-related homicide,” and that the suspects fled into the building when they saw the officers approaching.

The police report said Jose Perez, armed with a gun, entered the building through the front lobby. It said one officer asked Perez to stop and drop the weapon, but alleged that he ignored the order and ran up to the second floor, turning to point his pistol at an officer.

Fearing for his life, the officer shot at Perez, but Perez continued to run upstairs, the police report said.

Perez denies that he had a gun in his hand and said police did not shout out a warning or tell him to halt before they opened fire. “Out of nowhere, I got shot,” he said. “I would have stopped.”

As Perez ran upstairs, a resident he knew as Salvador, who was coming down the stairs with his children, was shot in the arm and chest by police, whose account said the shots ricocheted. Perez said Salvador was a witness to the fact he did not have a gun.

In a separate interview with The Times on Friday, the resident, who identified himself as Salvador Ochoa, confirmed that he did not see a gun in Perez’s hands as he ran toward him.

Three officers in another part of the building said Perez’s friend, Juan Manuel Saldana, pointed his gun at them. Fearing for their lives, they said, one of them shot at him. Saldana kept running but--according to police--stopped to point his weapon at officers two more times, and they shot him, the police account said.

The police reports do not allege that either Jose Perez or Saldana fired the weapons they allegedly held.

Perez said he did not find out that his friend had been killed until later, when police told him that he had engaged in the illegal activity that brought about Saldana’s death--and that, therefore, he was responsible.

Perez said his plea bargain made him a marked man, a parolee well-known to neighborhood police. He said he believes that is why he was arrested an hour after the unrelated September 1998 shooting.

His public defender, Ramon Quintana, said Perez faces five counts of attempted murder and one count of assault with a firearm. Quintana said the charges stem from an alleged shooting at rival gang members at the same building where the first incident occurred.

A trial in March ended with a hung jury after Quintana argued that someone else was the shooter, and that police did not properly investigate the case. The case against Perez, which then involved assault charges, was refiled as an attempted murder, Quintana said.

“[Police] said it was me,” Perez said. “They say two little boys saw me do it. But they caught me an hour later and I didn’t have a gun in my hand. The deal that I took with the police officer [in the first case] is a pain. Now I’m on my second strike. It just doubled it up.”

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Special correspondent Joseph Trevino contributed to this story.