LOS ANGELES: The parents of a 14-year-old girl killed by Los Angeles police in a clothing store last year have filed a lawsuit against the department and the officer whose rifle round pierced a dressing room wall.
Valentina Orellana Peralta and her mother were shopping for Christmas clothes on Dec. 23 at a Burlington store in the San Fernando Valley’s North Hollywood neighborhood. They were inside a dressing room when they heard screams and Orellana Peralta locked the door.
Elsewhere in the store, 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez was behaving erratically and wielding a bike lock. He brutally attacked two women, including one who fell to the floor before he dragged her by her feet through the store’s aisles as she tried to crawl away.
Following 911 calls, Los Angeles police walked through the store in a formation, body-camera video shows. Officer William Dorsey Jones Jr., wielding a rifle, pushed to the front of the pack even as other officers repeatedly said “slow down” and “slow it down.”
The officers saw a woman crawling on the blood-stained floor and Lopez on the other side of the aisle, according to the video footage. “Hold up! Hold up!” another officer screamed just before Jones fired three shots.
One of the bullets went through the dressing room wall and fatally struck Orellana Peralta as her mother, Soledad Peralta, held her. Peralta “felt her daughter’s body go limp and watched helplessly as her daughter died while still in her arms,” the lawsuit states.
Police ordered Peralta to leave the dressing room and wait for “what seemed like an eternity,” according to the lawsuit. She was not told that her daughter had died.
Her family, who had left Chile to get away from violence and injustice in search of a better life in the US, remembered Orellana Peralta as a happy teen with many friends who loved sports, adored animals and excelled in school.
Her father, Juan Pablo Orellana Larenas, and Peralta allege that LAPD failed to adequately train and supervise the responding officers and “fostered an environment that allowed and permitted this shooting to occur,” the lawsuit states.
“Filing this lawsuit is the first step for Soledad and Juan Pablo in seeking the transparency and justice promised to them by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti following the fatal shooting of their daughter, Valentina,” the family’s attorney, Rahul Ravipudi, said in a statement Tuesday.
Ravipudi added: “It is their deepest hope that those responsible for her death will be held accountable and that changes will be made to LAPD policies, practices, and standards for using deadly force that will prevent yet another senseless tragedy at the hands of law enforcement.”
Lopez was also shot and killed by police. An autopsy report showed he was on methamphetamine at the time of his death.
The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on July 14, alleges wrongful death and negligence, as well as negligent infliction of emotional distress, and seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages. In addition to the LAPD and Jones, the lawsuit also names the city of Los Angeles and Burlington Stores Inc. as defendants.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore on Tuesday offered his condolences to Orellana Peralta’s family.
“The loss of her life is tragic,” he said. “It remains a point of grief for us as well.”
It was not immediately clear whether Jones had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. The city attorney’s office said it was reviewing the complaint and Burlington Stores Inc. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The California Department of Justice is investigating the shooting, as is the LAPD.
Family of 14-year-old girl shot by LA police files lawsuit
https://arab.news/p9gnt
Family of 14-year-old girl shot by LA police files lawsuit
- The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on July 14, alleges wrongful death and negligence, as well as negligent infliction of emotional distress, and seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
