2 LAPD Officers Adamantly Deny Guilt in Rampart Testimony

Testifying in their own defense in the Rampart police corruption trial, two more LAPD officers on Friday denied in the strongest terms that they had conspired to fabricate evidence and frame innocent people.

As his lawyer, Barry Levin, guided Sgt. Edward Ortiz count by count through the crimes he is accused of, Ortiz intoned, “No I did not,” 11 times.

The veteran officer, 44, denied conspiring to corrupt justice by framing suspects, planting evidence and approving falsified police reports. He noted that he is charged with engaging in a scheme that extended 18 months after he left Rampart’s CRASH unit, an anti-gang detail.

Earlier, suspended Officer Michael Buchanan, 30, had used a few “absolutely nots” and “none whatsoevers,” lending variety to his denials as he was questioned by his defense attorney, Harland W. Braun.

Buchanan said he had indeed been struck by a pickup truck driven by fleeing gang members during a gang sweep that went bad the night of July 19, 1996.

He denied conspiring to frame anybody by exaggerating his injuries, demonstrating for jurors how he rolled off the hood of the pickup and landed on his hands and knees, then looked over his shoulder and saw his partner, Brian Liddy, struck by the truck’s open door and knocked down.

“He was on the ground. He was on his rear end,” Buchanan said of his partner.

While he initially believed that the gang members, Raul Munoz and Cesar Natividad, had hit them intentionally, Buchanan testified Friday that he had no way of knowing what they were thinking. He also said that while he initially believed his head had cracked the pickup’s windshield, he no longer believes it did.

Munoz testified that he received a ticket for the cracked windshield in the San Fernando Valley a few weeks earlier. His story was verified by testimony by the officer who wrote the ticket.

Ortiz, Buchanan, Liddy, 39, and Officer Paul Harper, 33, are accused of conspiring to obstruct justice. All four have denied the charges from the witness stand.

The officers have displayed a united front in defending themselves in the high-profile case, the first to arise from the yearlong Rampart police corruption scandal.

Jurors listened intently Friday. They could begin deliberating early next week.

Ortiz was by far the most contentious of the four defendants.

At one point, as he testified that officers were rounding up gang members in an alley because they had helped a murder suspect nicknamed Stymie escape the raid, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Laesecke grew incredulous.

“Are you saying you could bring all those people in the alley into the district attorney’s office for aiding and abetting the flight of Stymie?” she asked, her voice rising.

“You brought me here,” Ortiz shot back as the courtroom erupted in laughter.

“Basically, for doing my job,” he added.

As Ortiz described it, the scene in an alley on the night of July 19, 1996, seemed more chaotic than conspiratorial.

CRASH officers, looking for Stymie, had planned to sneak up on a gang meeting in the alley, driving there in a line. But the lead car, driven by Rafael Perez and his partner, Raquel Duarte Argomaniz, made a wrong turn, Ortiz testified: Soon afterward, he heard over his police radio: “Compromise! Compromise! Compromise!”

He explained, “It means we’d been made,” that the suspects knew police were coming. “We’d lost the element of surprise.”

They continued on, Ortiz said.

“Now we have a chaotic situation,” he testified. “You have suspects running all over the place and officers running all over the place trying to round up the suspects.”

He said he saw the pickup speed past him as he arrived. He met Buchanan on the street. “I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ I noticed his pants were torn and I asked if he was OK. He said, ‘I just got hit by the pickup truck.’ He said he was OK,” Ortiz testified. Later, he said, Liddy also told him he’d been hit by the truck.

Laesecke, the prosecutor, pressed Ortiz for an explanation of why he didn’t order his men to seek medical care until five hours later. He said it didn’t occur to him. Regarding Buchanan, whose injuries were more visible, Ortiz said: “He’s an adult. I asked him if he was OK and he said yeah.”

Ortiz also denied conspiring with Liddy and Harper to plant a gun on 18th Street gang member Allan Lobos during an April 26, 1996, gang sweep. Harper and Liddy also deny framing Lobos.

The convictions of Lobos, Munoz and Natividad were overturned after Perez told authorities they had been framed by corrupt officers at Rampart who were dedicated to clearing the streets of gang members at any cost.

The four officers were the first charged in the wake of the scandal unleashed by Perez, their former colleague. Facing a lengthy sentence for stealing $1 million worth of evidence cocaine, Perez has made allegations of widespread corruption, naming several officers.