Two Officers Guilty of ‘Minor Breach of Policy,’ Board Finds

A Los Angeles Police Department disciplinary board Tuesday found that two police officers “should have conducted a more thorough investigation” of the kidnapping of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz of West Hills, who was murdered two days later.

The chairman of the three-member Board of Rights, Capt. Gary Williams, said a penalty for officers Brent Rygh and Donovan Lyons will be announced today after the panel hears character witnesses for them.

The penalty could range from an official reprimand to firing, but the public member of the board, Xavier Hermosillo, said he expected that the officers had long LAPD careers ahead of them.

Williams said officers Rygh and Lyons were guilty “not of unprofessional conduct but were not up to what should have been expected.” The LAPD “has high expectations,” he said, in explaining what he termed a “narrowly reached” unanimous decision.

Neither the officers nor their attorneys commented on the verdict, which came after about three hours of deliberations.

The board’s verdict came on the same day that a Santa Barbara jury found Ryan Hoyt, 22, guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder in the Markowitz case. Hoyt, the accused triggerman, was one of five men charged in the abduction and murder. Three others are awaiting trial and a fourth, Jesse James Hollywood, is a fugitive. Hoyt could face the death penalty.

Each board member explained his decision at length. Williams and Hermosillo said the officers’ actions, even if derelict, did not contribute to the events that led to the machine-gun killing of Markowitz.

The Markowitz kidnapping, on Aug. 6, 2000, was reported in two 911 calls. Testimony in the board hearing, however, indicated that Rygh and Lyons did not receive complete information from emergency operators and ended up not investigating the case as a kidnapping.

Two operators, whose names were not released, were later suspended for three days. Capt. Jim Cansler, commander of the LAPD’s West Valley Division, requested the internal investigation of Rygh and Lyons.

The board found that while Rygh had placed a call on his cellular phone to one of the 911 callers, Pauline Mahoney, he should have followed up with a personal interview of Mahoney.

Capt. Bruce Crosley, the third panel member, said the information that reached the officers “was iffy”--they testified they never were told that Markowitz had been forced into a van--but that their inquiry was “not enough.”

The officers said they had the impression from Mahoney’s call that Markowitz had been in a fistfight with a group of teenagers, then walked away from it.

Mahoney, Crosley said, could have been “most helpful” in the board hearing, but had declined to appear.

Williams called the officers’ failure to talk again to Mahoney “a minor breach of policy.” But the captain also said that the cell phone discussion with her to determine what she had seen “should never have been a substitute” for an interview afterward.

Still, he told the officers, “This decision should in no way infer that your actions or inactions were connected to what later occurred.”

Hermosillo said he felt Rygh and Lyons, eight- and seven-year veterans of the LAPD respectively, had acted “professionally but not professionally enough, not thoroughly enough.”

“This was not the LAPD at its best, but not a deficiency either,” he added. He suggested that the Police Department should establish a clearer policy on cell phone conversations.

Hermosillo also said that two hours of deliberations focused on the officers’ state of mind when they began the investigation.

Hermosillo said he “could have dissented from” the guilty verdict, but decided to go along with the reasoning of the two police members of the board “that there had been a minor technical breach of policy.”