Deputy’s fears in Chino shooting may be issue

A heart-pounding high-speed police chase and a bystander’s amateur video, the grist of Southern California’s crude blend of street crime and reality television, will be at the center of a highly charged police brutality trial set to begin today in San Bernardino.

Ivory Webb Jr., a former San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, faces charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm for opening fire on an unarmed man sprawled on the ground after a pursuit in Chino in 2006.

In the widely broadcast video of the shooting, Webb fires on Elio Carrion, an off-duty Air Force police officer, three times as Carrion appears to follow Webb’s order to stand up.

That tape is a key piece of evidence in the prosecution’s arsenal, along with Webb’s differing explanations to investigators about why he opened fire.

But defense attorneys will be asking the jury to look beyond the video and put themselves in the deputy’s squad car.

The shooting occurred after a dark blue Corvette, driven by an intoxicated Luis Escobedo, evaded Webb at what he said were speeds of more than 100 mph through Chino neighborhoods.

Escobedo and Carrion had already evaded one officer when they blew past Webb, blazing through one red light and stop sign after another, he told investigators.

When the chase ended with the Corvette crashing into a wall, Webb was alone on a dark Chino street, convinced the men had killed or robbed someone and were acting with no regard for human life, Webb has said in interviews with investigators obtained by The Times.

Webb said in the interviews that when he saw Carrion’s hand move toward his chest or under his jacket, he made a split-second calculation that Carrion was reaching for a weapon and shot him. Carrion, who underwent three and half months of physical therapy after the shooting, is back on duty at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

The video and eyewitness accounts, the crux of the prosecution’s case, tell a different story.

Carrion, Escobedo and amateur cameraman Jose Luis Valdes are all expected to testify that Carrion was following the officer’s orders to get up when he was shot and that Carrion did not make any threatening moves toward the officer.

The prosecution’s case that Webb’s account is not believable could also be bolstered by the fact that Webb gave different versions of his story before and after he saw the video as it was broadcast throughout California in February of last year.

In his initial account to an officer at the scene, Webb said he shot Carrion because the airman lunged at him. In a longer interview several days later, he said he fired when Carrion appeared to reach into his jacket for a weapon.

But John D. Barnett, a defense attorney who won an acquittal for Theodore J. Briseno, one of the Los Angeles police officers charged with assaulting Rodney King in 1991, said Webb’s differing versions of his story may be irrelevant to a jury because the jurors will be focused on Webb’s state of mind at the time of the shooting. Conflicting opinions over what Webb said to Carrion -- to either “get up” or “don’t get up” -- could be viewed the same way, he said.

“It doesn’t matter at all,” said Barnett, who is not connected to this case. “What matters is what did Webb believe he communicated and what was the response.”

Webb’s training, the information he was hearing over the radio and any visual cues that put him on high alert will be the most important factors in determining the verdict, Barnett said.

“You want to put the jury in the officer’s boots and in his head to see what he saw,” Barnett said. “We give wide latitude to police officers in respect to criminal prosecutions because we ask them to do the impossible ... to make split-second decisions in a matter of life and death.”

The prosecutor and defense attorneys declined to preview their cases before trial. But one of Webb’s attorneys, Michael D. Schwartz, made it clear in pretrial hearings that he intended to probe Carrion’s failure to follow Webb’s orders to stop talking and to keep his hands on the ground during the traffic stop.

Several use-of-force experts who have followed the case said Webb’s lawyers would have their own troubles explaining why Webb did not follow law enforcement protocol -- when he got out of his patrol car, for example, and stood over Carrion even though he was dealing with two suspects and did not have backup.

“There’s no place in the United States that tells officers to walk up and stand in an exposed position when confronting felons,” said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force.”

“I honestly don’t see anything” that stands in the defense’s favor on the videotape, Klinger said.

Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor who also specializes in the use of force, said that after viewing the video numerous times, he still did not see any action by Carrion that could explain why Webb fired.

“A shooting is not justified unless there is a significant threat to the officer,” Alpert said. “And if the suspect wasn’t going for a potential weapon or going for something that would disable the officer, I don’t know how they could justify the use of deadly force.”

maeve.reston@latimes.com