Ramon Antonio Vargas
The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.
JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives carrying out an undercover drug sting in Terrytown shot two men to death and wounded an investigator with friendly fire when one of the slain men backed a car into a deputy late Wednesday, according to authorities.
The violence unfolded in the parking lot outside an IHOP restaurant near the corner of Terry Parkway and Westbank Expressway about 10:20 p.m., where narcotics detectives had arranged to buy drugs from an alleged dealer they were led to by a confidential informant, Sheriff Joe Lopinto said during a news briefing early Thursday morning.
In plainclothes and in unmarked pickup trucks, at least four deputies converged on the silver car in which the target of the sting arrived to the parking lot, Lopinto said. Lopinto said the driver of that car then put the vehicle in reverse and struck a deputy, prompting two other detectives to fire their service weapons in their own defense.
Lopinto said bullets hit the driver, the passenger and a fourth deputy standing on the passenger side of the car, the windows of which were shot out.
According to Lopinto, the driver died on scene while the passenger died from his wounds at University Medical Center in New Orleans.
The shot deputy, who was hit in the abdomen, hopped in one of his colleague’s cruisers and took a ride to University Medical Center as well, where he underwent emergency surgery and was listed in critical – but stable – condition, Lopinto said.
The Sheriff’s Office early Thursday said the agency was optimistic that the deputy wounded by gunfire would survive. He was at least the second Sheriff’s Office deputy to be shot and wounded in the line of duty since December.
The deputy struck by the vehicle did not need to go to the hospital, Lopinto said. No one involved in the incident was immediately identified.
The bloodshed occurred just outside the front windows of an IHOP dining room where two tables of people were being served and four restaurant staffers were on duty.
Margie Greiner, an IHOP employee on duty at the time of the shootings, said she watched as the driver was handcuffed after the shooting and left on the ground while paramedics took the passenger away from the scene.
She recalled hearing a dozen shots that she initially mistook as someone setting off fireworks. Numerous cones typically used to mark spent bullet casings littered the pavement near the car at the center of the shooting.
“It happened in seconds, all of it,” Greiner said.
An employee at a nearby hotel who asked not to be identified also initially mistook the gunshots for firecrackers. But the stream of pops was “long enough to make you think, ‘Something is not right here,’” and she soon realized multiple people had been shot, she said.
A man in a Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office morgue van took the body of the driver away from the scene about 1:30 a.m. Thursday. Firefighters later showed up in a truck to hose a large bloodstain away from the pavement.
As he’s done before, Lopinto early Thursday defended the importance of the work done by his agency’s narcotics unit. Lopinto, a former narcotics detective, often highlights the unit as one of the reasons Jefferson Parish has registered record-low crime rates in recent years.
“People play stupid games when it comes to narcotics, and unfortunately we have to walk into that dividing line to try to make this parish a little bit safer every single day,” Lopinto said Thursday. “Unfortunately, we had not only two people killed because of that, but I have one deputy who was hit by a vehicle and another who was shot by a gun.”
Yet, over the years, the narcotics unit has been at the center of many of the agency’s most serious use-of-force incidents.
The men slain Wednesday night became the second and third to be killed in an encounter with Sheriff’s Office narcotics detective in less than a year.
On May 10, after a car and foot chase during an undercover sting operation involving a confidential informant, Keeven Robinson died while deputies handcuffed him in the backyard of a home in the Shrewsbury neighborhood off Jefferson Highway.
Officials have said Robinson died after someone either squeezed, grabbed or leaned on his neck during a struggle. Four deputies were assigned to desk duty following Robinson’s homicide, but Jefferson Parish prosecutors have not announced a decision about whether or not they will file criminal charges in the case.
Additionally, there have been a number of other instances over the past few years in which narcotics detectives have shot the drivers of vehicles they claimed were being driven toward them. Some of those cases – as well as others involving allegations that investigators roughed up suspects during drug arrests – have produced civil lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office in recent years, though the agency has successfully defended itself in many of those disputes.
Policies in effect at the New Orleans Police Department and agencies in other major U.S. cities prohibit officers from firing at vehicles coming toward them if the drivers aren’t wielding a second form of force, such as by pointing a gun.
But the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has not adopted a policy like that.
The Sheriff’s Office does not equip its deputies with body-worn or dashboard cameras, citing the steep cost of storing the footage.
However, even agencies with those devices – such as NOPD – generally don’t require plainclothes officers to wear them to protect their cover.
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©2019 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.