Officer Testifies She Shot Teen as Last Resort

A Ventura police officer testified Monday that she considered using every instrument on her belt to stop a teenage girl who threatened her with a knife -- her baton, her pepper spray, even her tape recorder -- but resorted to shooting the troubled girl because she wouldn’t back off.

“Nothing I was doing made her stop,” Officer Kristin Rupp said on the opening day of the girl’s trial on one felony count of assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon. “It was a terrifying experience.”

After responding to the home of the girl’s foster parents in May, the rookie officer said she repeatedly told the 14-year-old to drop the kitchen knife and then decided to defy her department’s shoot-to-kill policy and aim her gun well below the girl’s chest.

“I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to kill her. I just want to stop the threat,’ ” Rupp said.

At least one of the first two shots struck the girl in the lower abdomen, but she continued to advance with the knife, the officer said. But after being hit a third time, she crumpled to the kitchen floor. The four other officers at the house rushed in to handcuff the girl and tend to her wounds, Rupp testified.

The officer’s testimony suggested that the girl, a Chinese immigrant, wanted police to kill her.

“You were supposed to kill me. Why didn’t you kill me?” Rupp said the bleeding girl told officers.

In the defense’s opening statement, the girl’s lawyer said inept officers ignored procedures for dealing with emotionally disturbed subjects. Further, attorney Paul Loh said, the knee-jerk shooting was just another instance in which the troubled girl was abandoned by adults and the system.

“Youth has dealt her a very cruel hand,” he told Ventura County Superior Court Judge Herbert Curtis III.

The girl’s mother abandoned her as a baby in China, he said. After she moved to the United States to live with her father, a Newbury Park restaurateur, he whipped her with a belt and kicked her out of his house. When the father was convicted of child abuse, the child-welfare system tried to send the daughter back to China “as if returning damaged merchandise to the factory,” Loh said.

The girl’s attorneys have filed a civil claim against the city of Ventura and Ventura County, contending that the shooting was unjustified, and accusing the county of failing to train the girl’s foster family and failing to provide adequate treatment for her injuries.

The Ventura Police Department cleared Rupp, 24, of any wrongdoing.

Chinese American leaders in Ventura and Los Angeles counties have called for the girl’s release. The trial continues today with testimony from Zaida Worthley, who, with her husband, hosted the girl and three other foster children in their home last May.