No excuse

If Pomona police were indeed following protocol when they failed to check a van that held the body of its missing owner, they need a new protocol.

Officers found Eileen Nicole Ponce-Orta’s van parked illegally. The front windows were rolled down. They quickly learned that Ponce-Orta’s family had reported the 22-year-old woman as missing. Her 2-year-old daughter had been dropped off at a police station by a member of her husband’s family.

Hmm. Strange circumstances. Possible danger to the missing woman.

Rather than treating the van as a potential crime scene, though, the police called the family to come pick it up or face having to bail it out of impoundment. Once the family members arrived, they found the young woman’s body under blankets on the back seat.

Police Chief Joe Romero stood up for his department, saying that “there was no way officers could have known” a body lay inside the vehicle. They had followed protocol, the chief said. Given the possibility of harm to a young woman and the easy access to the interior of the van, this defense is difficult to swallow.

Of course, the Pomona gaffe isn’t as bad as the time in December when a car that had crashed in Tarzana was towed to an impound lot without police or paramedics noticing the body of a 72-year-old woman inside. But that’s not much of an excuse.

In the Pomona case, the main consequence was that a family made the shocking discovery of a loved one’s corpse. It’s also possible that they unwittingly damaged evidence. But the procedures followed in this case could have more dire results in another. What about cases in which the time of the discovery might have made the difference between a badly injured woman and a dead one?

Pomona police should be questioning their protocols instead of using them as an excuse.