"Unbeknownst to the police, a 14-year-old girl was in a dressing room on the other side of a wall directly behind the suspect" and it was only after the shooting that the officers discovered the teenager had been fatally shot.
(Los Angeles) A 14-year-old girl was killed in a changing room by a stray bullet fired by a police officer responding to an assault in the store, Los Angeles Police said on Monday, which opened an investigation and released. videos of the incident. The drama took place on December 23 at a clothing store in North Hollywood, near Los Angeles, where police were called over an ongoing "armed robbery", the statement said. police.
On their arrival, the police had discovered in the shelves of the store a woman in blood "suffering from various injuries", but conscious, a few meters from the suspect.
According to on-board camera footage released on Monday, one of the officers almost immediately opened fire three times on the suspect with a rifle, killing him fatally.
"Unbeknownst to the police, a 14-year-old girl was in a dressing room on the other side of a wall directly behind the suspect" and it was only after the shooting that the officers discovered that the teenager had been shot dead.
According to the first elements of the investigation, "it appears that the victim was struck by a bullet which ricocheted on the ground and penetrated the wall of the dressing room," police said.
Valentina Orellana-Peralta was shopping with her mother for her fifteenth birthday, the "quinceanera," a hugely important coming-of-age ceremony in Latin America and among some Hispanic communities in the United States.
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore deplored "a chaotic incident that resulted in the death of an innocent child," apologized to the family and pledged to shed light on " circumstances which led to this tragedy ”.
As such, he requested that emergency calls, radio exchanges, images from on-board cameras and CCTV be made public on Monday.
In her call to police, a store worker said the man was holding up a heavy bicycle lock that he was using to try to assault customers. In another emergency call, a client mentioned a gun and shots, but no gun was found at the scene.
The 24-year-old man, who had previously been charged with violence, first stood at the foot of an escalator where he assaulted two clients, trying to grab their bags.
Obviously very agitated and in a daze, we see him in the CCTV footage removing his pants before going upstairs. It was there that he attacked a third victim from behind, repeatedly hitting her on the head with his padlock.
One of the leading civil rights organizations for Hispanic Americans, Lulac, strongly criticized the conditions under which the police intervened on Monday.
"It is unacceptable that the Los Angeles police were able to open fire in a crowded store at the height of Christmas shopping without knowing for sure whether the suspect was armed," reacted the president of Lulac, Domingo Garcia.