By Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy shot a driver early Thursday in Bell Gardens, spraying the man’s SUV with bullets after it repeatedly rammed his patrol cruiser, officials said.
The deputy from the East Los Angeles sheriff’s station was near Eastern and Florence avenues when he saw the white SUV enter the intersection while speeding and doing “donuts,” L.A. County Sheriff’s Department officials said.
“As the deputy entered the intersection in an attempt to warn other drivers on the road of the potential danger and initiate a traffic stop, the suspect vehicle is believed to have intentionally collided into the deputy’s patrol vehicle,” according to the department.
A bystander’s video of the incident shows the driver ram into the rear of the sheriff’s Ford Explorer. The driver briefly opens, then shuts his door before twice backing up and accelerating into the driver’s side of the Explorer. At that point, the deputy opens fire from inside the vehicle, letting off one or two shots.
The white SUV then reverses and plows into the sheriff’s vehicle again, and the deputy fires more than a dozen shots. The SUV retreats, eventually coming to a stop in the middle of the road.
The driver was taken into custody and transported to a hospital with gunshot wounds. He was listed in stable condition. Officials did not say how many times the deputy fired at the driver.
The deputy suffered an unspecified injury and was taken to a hospital, a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman said.
News helicopter footage of the scene at daylight showed a Sheriff’s Department SUV with a clearly smashed driver-side door, indicating a collision. A white SUV driven by the wounded man had visible bullet holes in the front windshield and the rear windows blown out.
Sheriff’s homicide detectives responded to the scene to investigate the shooting along with the inspector general’s investigators Thursday morning.
Since 2016, the Sheriff’s Department has had a restrictive policy that instructs deputies not to fire at a moving vehicle or its occupants unless a person in the automobile is “imminently threatening a department member or another person present with deadly force by means other than the moving vehicle.”
The policy states that the vehicle itself “shall not presumptively constitute a threat that justifies the use of deadly force.”
Last year, a former deputy was charged by the L.A. County district attorney with voluntary manslaughter for killing an unarmed man as he tried to flee in a car.
Andrew Lyons, who sheriff’s officials said was fired from the Sheriff’s Department after the 2019 shooting, has pleaded not guilty to that charge and two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
Criminal charges are exceedingly rare in police shootings. But in Lyons’ case, the incident was captured on videos from security cameras that clearly showed the brief encounter between deputies and 24-year-old Ryan Twyman.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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