D.A. Clears 6 Officers in Shooting

The Orange County district attorney’s office has cleared six Anaheim police officers in the shooting of two armed robbery suspects who died in a barrage of gunfire earlier this year at a Garden Grove shopping plaza.

The April 20 shooting that killed Anaheim residents Claro Hernandez, 24, and Sergio Perez, 29, sent bystanders diving for cover and left the robbery suspects’ car riddled with bullet holes. Police said the men were responsible for more than 20 fast-food restaurant holdups and fired on them shortly after an El Pollo Loco was robbed of $2,100 at Harbor Town & Country Center.

“The shootings . . . were reasonable under the totality of the circumstances that existed at the time,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary Anne McCauley wrote in a letter Tuesday to the Anaheim Police Department.

The officers were part of a surveillance team that had tailed Hernandez and Perez to the shopping plaza. Officials said the goal of the operation was to identify the suspects and not to catch them in the act of committing a crime, although that is essentially what happened that night.