Alleged Payback Shooting by LAPD Still Reverberates

Guns drawn, four Los Angeles police officers charged into a Mission Hills home just after midnight two years ago and ordered the occupants to hit the floor.

According to an LAPD news release, the officers were conducting “an assault-with-a-deadly weapon-follow-up investigation.” More specifically, they were searching for a young man accused of throwing a half-empty beer can at an off-duty officer’s car earlier in the evening. They found the suspect watching television.

“You [messed] with the LAPD,” one officer was quoted as saying as he allegedly punched and kneed the man. “That was my partner you threw the beer can at.”

In the flash that followed, the night’s events were transformed into a controversial police shooting that left homeowner Steven Short--who confronted with a shotgun what he thought were intruders but who had nothing to do with the thrown beer can--flat on his back with a gunshot wound.

The Feb. 8, 1999, incident would also eventually fuel an ongoing behind-the-scenes debate between the Police Commission’s inspector general and the chief of police, both of whom report to the commission. The commission itself struggled to resolve the issues raised by the incident.

Although the officers’ tactics were condemned by the inspector general, members of the Police Commission and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, they received no punishment other than official reprimands.

Police Commissioner T. Warren Jackson acknowledged in an interview last week that he felt the case was mishandled by everyone involved, including the commission.

“There’s shared blame here,” he said. “I’m disappointed that the process broke down in this case.”

Commission President Raquelle de la Rocha, also interviewed last week, called the raid on Short’s home “a personal vendetta that was totally inappropriate.”

The handling of the case was criticized in a series of confidential reports by Inspector General Jeffrey C. Eglash, who accused the chief of failing to discipline the officers out of irritation with the commission.

Parks intended to issue suspensions, but he reversed course after he had a disagreement with the commission over how it intended to proceed in the matter, Eglash wrote in the documents, copies of which were obtained by The Times.

Over Parks’ objection, the commission voted to postpone resolution of the matter to give the inspector general more time to investigate. To “get back” at the commission, the chief, in turn, refused to discipline the officers, according to Eglash’s report.

Inspector Wanted Case Taken to U.S. Attorney

LAPD officials cast the disagreement differently, saying Parks intended to suspend the officers but changed his mind after delays created by the commission’s handling of the investigation. Those delays caused the statute of limitations to expire, they said.

Eglash, a former federal prosecutor, also accused Parks of condoning what the inspector believed was illegal conduct by the officers. In fact, Eglash was so troubled by the shooting that he recommended to the commission that it refer the matter to the civil rights section of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

The commission did not do so, but federal prosecutors, prompted by inquiries from The Times, have contacted the LAPD in recent days to inquire about the incident.

Parks declined to be interviewed for this article. But, speaking through various officials, he denied Eglash’s allegation that he was retaliating against the commission by refusing to suspend the officers.

Defending the chief, LAPD Cmdr. Daniel Koenig said the accusation against Parks comes from a “myopic, naive” inspector general who doesn’t understand the law.

The events leading to the shooting started about 10:45 p.m. on Feb. 7, 1999. Officer Chad Butler had just finished his shift at the Devonshire Division and was driving home when a passenger in a car ahead of him--for no apparent reason--threw a can of beer at his vehicle, according to police reports. The passenger then stuck his head out the window, shouted obscenities at Butler and challenged him to a fight, the reports state.

Butler ignored the taunts, instead noting the car’s license plate number, and drove to the Foothill police station to report the incident, police documents show.

At the station, Officers David Hance and Jeffrey Nuttall, with whom Butler had once partnered, were immediately assigned to a “follow-up” investigation. Butler joined his on-duty colleagues in the back of their squad car after they used the license number to find the address of the car’s owner.

On the way to the owner’s residence, the officers happened to spot the car on the freeway and pulled the driver over, police said. The driver was handcuffed and questioned by the officers about his friend who threw the beer can. The officers then had the driver telephone his friend and get the address of where he was without alerting him that the police would be on their way to arrest him.

Hance and Nuttall asked two other officers, Michael Patton and David Fletcher, to assist them in arresting the man, Travis Garlits.

When they arrived at the home, the officers said, they noticed the front door slightly ajar. With his gun drawn, Hance knocked on the door and identified himself as an officer, police said, and the knock caused the door to swing open. Inside, the officers saw Garlits sitting on the couch with two men and a woman. The officers, who all had their guns drawn, ordered everyone to lie on the floor.

According to the police report, Officer Patton heard a noise coming from one of the bedrooms and went to investigate. He said he identified himself as a police officer and knocked on the door. The door was answered by Short, a 23-year-old television stage worker, who was armed with a shotgun. Short said he was awakened by the commotion and grabbed his weapon to investigate the disturbance.

Patton shouted at Short to drop the shotgun just as Short placed his finger on the trigger and began moving the barrel upward, the police report states.

Allegedly fearing for his life, Patton shot Short, striking him in the hip. Meanwhile, according to the report, Garlits was attempting to escape and had to be forcefully subdued by Officer Nuttall. The police then arrested everyone in the house.

Police and Witnesses’ Versions Differ Starkly

In his reports to the Police Commission, Eglash noted that the official police account is starkly different from those given by other witnesses.

For example, Short acknowledged that he was armed with a shotgun but said he was shot before he even had a chance to drop the weapon.

“Why did you shoot me?” one witness quoted Short as saying to Patton. “You came into my house. I didn’t know you were the police. I was trying to drop the gun.”

In an interview last week, Short said he was stunned by what the officers did that night. “I honestly thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to keep shooting.”

Witnesses, all of whom were in the house, also disputed the allegation that Garlits was trying to flee. They said Nuttall took Garlits to the hallway and started beating him with his fists and kneeing him.

Patton and Hance declined to comment for this article. The other officers did not respond to requests for interviews made with their attorney. None of the officers replied to a letter sent to the LAPD’s Foothill Division.

Beyond the disputed facts of the incident, Eglash concluded that the officers had no legal justification to enter Short’s residence or arrest some of the people there. The officers did not have a warrant for their search.

Eglash said Garlits was “mostly guilty of being an obnoxious jerk, not a violent felon.”

As with other aspects of Eglash’s analysis, police dispute those conclusions. Throwing an object at a car can be a felony, and the LAPD argues that the officers were entitled to enter the residence because they were in pursuit of a suspected felon. Those circumstances, according to spokesmen for Parks, justified entering the residence without a warrant.

Officers’ Conduct Called ‘Overreaction’

“The police response here appears to have been an overreaction, given the nature of the offense,” Eglash wrote. “One is certainly left to wonder whether the response would have been the same had the beer can struck the car of an ordinary citizen rather than an off-duty officer.”

Initially, the district attorney’s office rejected filing any charges against Short, although the LAPD requested prosecution for assault with a deadly weapon.

“There is insufficient evidence of any criminal intent on Short’s part,” wrote Deputy Dist. Atty. William H. Johnson.

A month later, however, Johnson charged Short with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and one count of exhibiting a firearm. Short pleaded no contest to the exhibiting charge and was sentenced to 15 days in jail, which he had already served, and three years’ probation, according to a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. He later filed a civil rights lawsuit against the LAPD.

Garlits, who threw the beer can, was never charged with a felony. He was convicted of a misdemeanor.

Nearly a year after the shooting, the chief submitted his formal review of the incident to the commission.

Because the one-year statute of limitations to impose discipline on the officers was about to expire, Eglash suggested that the commission adopt the chief’s finding that the tactics were faulty but postpone decisions on other elements of the shooting until Eglash could conduct his own investigation.

That way, he said, the chief could move forward and discipline the officers for their poor tactics before the deadline.

Eglash said the chief objected to the commission handling the review in a piecemeal fashion rather than all at once and therefore refused to discipline the officers.

“While the chief has the sole authority to impose discipline, here it seems that he was intent on disciplining until the commission took a position with which he disagreed, and the chief then decided not to discipline,” Eglash wrote.

LAPD spokesman Lt. Horace Frank said the chief told the commission that any attempt “to bifurcate,” or split up, the evaluation of the shooting was unfair to the officers, against the department’s long-standing tradition of handling cases all at once and, in the chief’s view, illegal. Frank also said the department disagreed with Eglash’s conclusions that the officers’ conduct was potentially illegal, noting that the district attorney filed charges against Short and two other men in the house.

Cecil Marr, who heads the city attorney’s police litigation unit, said the commission’s decision to split up its review of the shooting appeared to him more a question of policy than a legal matter.

Eglash wrote two reports on the shooting, one on Jan. 24, 2000, and another two weeks later, on Feb. 9. In the latter report, he recommended that the commission rule the shooting “out of policy,” in part because the officers had engaged “in a freelance operation.”

‘The Whole Scenario . . . Was Troubling’

Like Eglash, some members of the commission were concerned by the facts of the shooting and the chief’s refusal to impose discipline before the statute of limitations expired.

“The whole scenario of this shooting was troubling to me,” said Gerald L. Chaleff, president of the commission at the time the shooting was reviewed. “And I was troubled with the fact that the chief didn’t discipline [the officers] for the poor tactics that led to the shooting.”

Despite his misgivings, Chaleff said that, based on the LAPD’s current rules, he felt compelled to find the shooting within policy--though he believes the rules governing use of deadly force should be changed.

In the end, the commissioners unanimously sided with Parks in finding that the shooting itself conformed with LAPD policy, despite the questionable tactics.

Commissioner Jackson, who still serves on the panel, said he believed that the chief’s failure to impose discipline sprang, not from anger at the commission, but rather from Parks’ sincere belief that such a course would have been procedurally improper. Therefore, Jackson said, it was wrong of Eglash to “impugn the chief’s motives.”

A civil trial in connection with the shooting recently concluded with a judge ruling that Short and another man had been unlawfully detained by police. They were awarded a total of $200,000. But the jury concluded that the officers did not violate the victims’ civil rights.

Attorney Carol Watson, who represented Short, said jurors may have decided differently if they had been aware of the allegations in Eglash’s reports, which were not turned over to her. She said she plans to move for a new trial.