Police Panel Wasn’t Given Full Facts in Gunfire Case

To members of the Los Angeles Police Commission, Officer-Involved Shooting No. 14-99 seemed like just another case of a good cop defending himself against a gang member with a gun.

A written summary of the case, submitted to the commission by Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, offered no hint of controversy surrounding the confrontation in Southeast Los Angeles. Rather, it described a scenario in which an officer, fearing for his life, fired two rounds at a teenager who allegedly pointed a gun at him from the window of a crack house.

As a result, on Feb. 1, 2000, the commission unanimously adopted the chief’s recommendation that the shooting by Officer William Ferguson was within the department’s rules. The determination was critical because the civilian commission has the final word over matters involving the use of deadly force.

But police officials knew far more about the shooting and its aftermath than the Police Commission was told, according to confidential police documents and interviews.

Among the key facts withheld from commissioners when they cast their votes:

* At the time Parks was recommending that the commissioners find the shooting “in policy,” LAPD detectives were--and still are--pursuing criminal charges against Ferguson and possibly other officers for their roles in the Feb. 8, 1999, shooting and its aftermath, law enforcement sources said.

* Ferguson, in the opinion of his captain and other supervisors, at the time of the shooting exhibited “a pattern of conduct that [was] consistent with criminal police misconduct,” according to an affidavit in support of a search warrant for the officer’s locker and car. During a search two weeks after the shooting, detectives found a handgun replica that “was most likely being carried by Ferguson to be used as planted evidence,” confidential police documents state.

* The sergeant in charge of securing the shooting scene told Internal Affairs detectives in December 1999 that he had watched as Ferguson suddenly ran to a rear bedroom of the house without his permission. As the sergeant entered the room, he found Ferguson holding a .22-caliber gun that he claimed the suspect had pointed at him minutes before. The sergeant has since told the LAPD’s inspector general and The Times that he actually saw Ferguson plant the weapon. The sergeant, who is on a stress leave and is suing the LAPD, claims he made that allegation on the night of the shooting, a charge that LAPD officials vehemently deny.

Commissioner Herbert F. Boeckmann II said in a recent interview that he was disturbed that police officials did not call the commission’s attention to what he described as troubling and relevant facts surrounding the officer-involved shooting.

“It’s very disconcerting to me, to say the least,” Boeckmann said.

Following inquiries by The Times, Police Commissioner Dean Hansell has called for a closed-door briefing on the shooting investigation at today’s regularly scheduled commission meeting.

“If we later find out that we made a decision that was based on incomplete information, we would want to take steps to rectify the situation,” Hansell said.

Parks declined repeated requests to be interviewed, instead referring questions to his spokeswoman, Cmdr. Sharon Papa. Papa said the chief was unaware there was a pending criminal investigation of the shooting when the commission took the matter up last year.

That case, involving Ferguson and his partner, was referred to the district attorney’s office by the LAPD in November 1999. Parks “never signed off” on the case, despite an LAPD policy requiring the chief to approve any such referral, Papa said. She said the chief was also unaware of the search warrant and the recovery of a handgun replica from Ferguson’s locker.

Just days after the commission’s vote, Parks’ chief of staff, Deputy Chief David J. Gascon, signed papers ordering Ferguson to a disciplinary hearing on charges of possessing the handgun replica and threatening a witness in the case, according to documents.

The documents also accused Ferguson of inappropriately trying to “gain entry” into the residence the night of the shooting. Six months later, in the summer of 2000, those charges were included in a document approved by Parks himself.

Papa said the chief did not realize that the disciplinary charges stemmed from the shooting incident until two weeks ago, just before his civil court deposition in connection with the shooting.

As a result of the ongoing investigation, the conviction of 14-year-old Frank Harris, who allegedly pointed the gun at Ferguson, was overturned last year. Harris has since filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that he was unarmed the night of the shooting and was framed by police.

The suit also contends that a week after the shooting, Ferguson and his partner, Jeffrey Robb, broke into the house where it took place and planted drugs on some of the occupants. The subsequent convictions of those people, who are also suing the city, were overturned as well.

Ferguson and Robb, through their lawyers, denied any wrongdoing.

Ellen Ellison, who is representing Harris and his friends, has sought to question both officers. Robb has refused to answer questions and Ferguson has yet to appear, she said.

Robb, 28, resigned from the LAPD last year in the face of unrelated misconduct charges that also involved Ferguson, according to confidential police documents.

Ferguson, also 28, is being tried before an LAPD disciplinary panel on charges related to the shooting and the alleged framing of Ellison’s clients. He is now relieved of duty.

‘Batman and Robin’ on the Street

Even before the shooting, the two officers had attracted attention, both for their gung-ho tactics and for resulting complaints. The young officers, who were trained by CRASH officers in the troubled Rampart Division, were known on the streets of Southeast as “Batman and Robin.”

There are wildly varying accounts of what took place the night of Feb. 8, 1999.

Ferguson and Robb describe a routine narcotics investigation that turned potentially deadly when a teenage drug dealer pointed a gun at them through the window from which he allegedly dispensed rock cocaine.

The teenager and his friends describe an encounter with police officers behaving so bizarrely that they called 911 for help.

The confusion of the night was captured on the 911 tape, with gunshots ringing out in the background as one of the residents, Magellan Harmon, pleads with the operator, “Hey, lady . . . get somebody over here!”

According to the official police account, the incident began when Ferguson and Robb, who were working the night shift in the Southeast Division, saw two women they recognized as cocaine users walking up the driveway of a house near the intersection of Manchester Avenue and Avalon Boulevard.

The officers followed the women, who allegedly acknowledged they were there to buy cocaine. One identified a “little guy with a striped shirt” as selling cocaine from a rear window, just a few feet from where she and the officer stood.

The woman, according to the police account, told Ferguson that the seller was armed. The officers radioed for backup, but as they waited for help, Ferguson saw a silhouette approaching the window.

The person, later identified as Harris, allegedly shouted, “Who . . . is out there?” Harris then extended his hand through a hole in the screen and pointed a revolver in the direction of Robb, according to the police account.

“Police! Drop the gun!” Ferguson yelled, police documents state.

When Harris then pointed the gun at Ferguson, the officer fired two rounds, missing both times, police said. Harris then pulled the gun back through the screen and retreated away from the window, out of view.

In the seconds after the shooting, Ferguson took cover, his gun still drawn. At that point, another officer responding to the call for backup mistook Ferguson for a suspect and fired two rounds at him. Ferguson was not hit. Parks deemed that officer’s use of force out of policy and he was suspended for 15 days.

The people in the house claim the police were terrorizing them. They said men began banging on their windows as they watched a Lakers game on television. When Harris asked who was outside, they said, one of the men responded, “89 Family Bloods,” the name of a street gang rival to that of the men in the house.

The men eventually said they were police officers and ordered those inside to open the door, according to Harris and others. At that point, Harmon called 911 and complained that men outside the home were identifying themselves as police and demanding entry.

“We don’t know if they’re real cops or not,” Harmon told the operator, according to the 911 tape.

She replied, “Sir, we don’t show any police at that [address].”

Moments later, there was a gunshot.

“They shot somebody!” a frantic Harmon can be heard shouting into the phone. “Oh, they shot a girl!”

A woman named Tyieka Harris later told Internal Affairs detectives that she was flushing rock cocaine down the toilet when a police officer pointed a gun at her through the bathroom window. She said the officer ordered her to stop, and when she continued, fired a single shot in her direction. She claimed that the shot grazed her head, but she did not receive medical treatment for the injury.

According to tapes of LAPD radio transmissions and the 911 tape, Ferguson, Robb and two other officers were just outside the house when the shot was fired at 7:43 p.m., preceding the shots Ferguson acknowledges firing at Frank Harris.

The officers all denied firing the first shot, or hearing one fired, though it is clearly audible on the 911 tape.

Although LAPD detectives assigned to investigate the shooting concluded that the shot was most likely fired from inside the house, the department’s Internal Affairs investigation later classified the shot as unaccounted for.

Also unexplained was the apparent disappearance of Ferguson’s shell casings, which investigators could not find after the shooting. The controversial first shot and the missing shell casings were not mentioned in Chief Parks’ summary to the Police Commission.

Sergeant Arrives to Debrief Officers

As the shooting stopped, Sgt. Warren “Ken” Brooks arrived and assumed control as the incident commander, according to documents and interviews. Brooks said he debriefed Ferguson and Robb. Brooks said he then told another sergeant to separate the officers and take them to the Southeast Division police station to take their statements, standard procedure after an officer-involved shooting.

But according to Brooks, that sergeant disregarded his order, saying he wanted to talk to the officers there.

As Brooks was assembling a team to search the house, an officer alerted Brooks that Ferguson and Robb had run into the house, Brooks said.

Brooks told LAPD investigators that he ran after the officers. As he made his way down the hallway, Brooks said, he found Ferguson in the rear bedroom with a .22-caliber revolver in his hand.

At this crucial point, Brooks’ account and the official version of events diverge.

According to police documents, Ferguson had been told by informants that there was a hiding place under the floor. When he found the gun on the floor, Ferguson said, he picked it up to ensure that no one could jump out from under the floor and use it.

Brooks, however, told The Times in recent interviews that he saw Ferguson pull the weapon from his rear waistband and place it under a bed near the window from which Harris had allegedly brandished the weapon minutes before.

“It was very clear to me what I saw,” Brooks said. “I saw him plant a gun.”

That characterization was also given by Brooks in mid-February 2000 to an investigator with the LAPD’s inspector general’s office. That office is continuing to investigate the case.

But Brooks had not been as explicit three months earlier, when he was interviewed by two detectives investigating the incident.

According to a tape of that December 1999 interview, Brooks said he followed Robb and Ferguson into the house and found Ferguson in the rear bedroom, crouching next to the bed.

“Hey, what are you doing? Get out of here,” Brooks said he told Ferguson. “And he stands up and goes, ‘I got it.’ And that’s when I see him with a gun. And I say, ‘Put that back.’ ”

Brooks added, “Now, I don’t know where that gun came from. Or what.”

Asked about the different accounts, Brooks insisted that there was no contradiction. He said his more recent description was merely the result of more detailed questioning. Brooks said that on the night of the shooting, he told Capt. Richard Bonneau, commanding officer of the Southeast Division, and Capt. James Tatreau, head of the department’s robbery-homicide unit, that he saw Ferguson plant a gun.

Both men assured him that investigators would get to the bottom of his allegations, Brooks said.

Bonneau and Tatreau vehemently deny Brooks’ allegations that he had told them he saw Ferguson plant a gun.

Today, Brooks is suing the LAPD, which he says retaliated against him for reporting alleged excessive-force violations by two other Southeast Division officers in an unrelated incident. He took a stress leave after the department accused him of failing to properly document the incident, he said.