LOS ANGELES — A supermarket worker was killed by a bullet fired by Los Angeles police — not the gunman they were trying to stop — the city’s police chief acknowledged Tuesday, defending the decision to use deadly force as an attempt to stop what officers feared could become a mass shooting.
The suspect, Gene Evin Atkins, 28, already had shot his grandmother, kidnapped his girlfriend and shot at officers Saturday afternoon as they chased his car and then as he ran into the Trader Joe’s in the city’s congested Silver Lake neighborhood, according to police.
After exchanging gunfire with police, Atkins ran into the store and took about 40 people hostage, police said.
Police released several minutes of body camera and dash-cam video that showed Atkins leading officers on the high-speed chase — during which officers say he’s shooting at them — before he crashed into a pole outside the market.
In deciding whether to open fire, officers had to consider whether the gunman was likely to harm the scores of shoppers and workers inside, police Chief Michel Moore said.
It’s “every officer’s worst nightmare to harm an innocent bystander,” he said.
“Those officers’ actions to stop him, the split-second decisions they had to make, I recognize how they will forever go through their lives debating whether that was what they had to do,” Moore said. “I believe it’s what they needed to do in order to defend … the people in that store and to defend themselves.”
As police chased the gunman after the car crash, one officer is heard on video saying she had pulled out her gun, but her partner tells her not to shoot.
However, two officers did fire back at Atkins just as the store’s assistant manager, Melyda Corado, 27, was walking out the door. One of the rounds went through her arm and into her body and she died at the scene, Moore said. No other bystanders were shot. Atkins was wounded in the arm.
The videos show Atkins running from his car after the crash and shooting at officers as they duck for cover behind the doors of their police car and return fire. They then position themselves behind a cement wall on the far end of the store’s parking lot as Atkins shoots three times from inside the store.
Officers fired a total of eight gunshots, Moore said.
Geoff Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina, said the video appeared to show a “very controlled police response” with few bystanders in the background.
“The officers were firing at a serious threat to the community. And then we have this tragedy of her coming out of the door,” said Alpert, who helped investigate a 2014 hostage standoff at a cafe in Sydney, Australia.
“This is one of those tragic situations that is kind of a lose-lose situation for the police,” he said.
