Celeste Fremon |
| Photos by Ted Soqui |
The day after 19-month-old Susie Peña died during
a shootout between her father, Raul Peña, and LAPD officers, family members
and friends arrive at the site of the carnage, partly to grieve, but also to
attempt to figure out how events could have gone so hideously wrong.
Some in the family think they personally could have changed things.
“The police should have let me talk to Raul, but they refused,” says
Peña’s brother Elias Peña, as he fingers the elaborate sprays
of bullet holes that pock the walls at Raul’s Auto Sales, the South Los Angeles
used-car dealership where the shooting took place. Others talk angrily about
how the press doesn’t get it, how the officers should have waited longer before
storming a building with a baby inside, and how if the same scenario had unfolded
in, say, Encino or Westwood, surely there would have been a different strategy
and a different end to the story.
“The police act like my father was Osama bin Laden,”
says Raul Peña’s 15-year-old stepson, Ronald Depaz. “But my dad
was a good man. He loved that baby. Police say he used her as a shield, but
he didn’t. I was here before the police made me leave, and I could hear Raul
shouting, ‘This is my baby! This is my baby!’ And the cops opened fire like
it was nothing. Did you see how many bullet holes there were in there?”
Ronald gestures toward the small interior office, now porous as a sieve. “One
of those bullets hit my sister.” At that, the boy’s veneer of composure
breaks, and, pulling his black T-shirt up over his face, he begins to cry hard.
That same Monday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa extends
his condolences to the Peña family yet points to Peña’s lethal
recklessness. “We don’t know exactly what happened,” Villaraigosa
says to reporters. “But we do know this: There was a man with a firearm
shooting at the public, shooting at officers. And, as a layman, I saw officers
doing everything they could. I saw three different officers crying afterward.”
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Herma
By Tuesday afternoon, LAPD Chief Bill Bratton has listened to
Peña’s family’s version of events for 48 hours and decides he’s had enough.
At a 4 p.m. press conference, he states unequivocally that officers used every
possible means to get baby Susie out alive, and that Peña dealt the play
all by himself. “This father is not a father of the year, as the family
is now attempting to portray him,” says Bratton, his expression grim and
furious. “I refuse to allow this department to be maligned [by people who
are] now trying to portray an individual who held his own daughter out as a
human shield as somehow a hero. This guy is not a hero. He is a cold-blooded
killer.”
The fatal sequence of events that has L.A.’s police chief lining
up on one side, the little girl’s family, their attorney and a string of community
activists on another side, with the mayor somewhere in the center striving to
calm the waters, began on Sunday just after 3 p.m., when Raul Peña left
his used-car dealership, located at 10420 S. Avalon Blvd., and went to the home
of the baby’s mother, Lorena Lopez, a half-block away. There, according to Lopez
and her sister, he picked up the couple’s plum-cheeked toddler, Susie, and brought
the girl back to work with him. “When my dad was under stress, he’d be
with the baby to relax,” says stepson Ronald. “Right now his business
was going bad, and there were some debts. So that’s why he took the baby to
work with him Sunday.”
Nonsense, say police, contending that a combustible situation
had been building in the family all weekend, that at 2 p.m. the day of the shooting,
Lorena Lopez made a “domestic-terror report” to the police about Peña.
And that after the shooting, Peña’s 16-year-old stepdaughter told police
that he was jacked up on alcohol and cocaine that day, and had threatened to
kill her, and baby Susie, and the girls’ mother, Lopez.
Whatever took place earlier, it appears that on Sunday, the stepdaughter,
whose name is Ilsy Depaz, followed her stepfather back to the dealership, where
Peña and the teenager got into an argument that escalated. Ilsy made
a 911 call and told the operator Peña was threatening her physically.
After the call came in to the Southeast Division of the LAPD at 3:47 p.m., two
officers responded and learned that Peña had a gun and had fired shots
before they got there. Family members and some witnesses disagree, saying that,
when police arrived, Peña walked out of his office holding baby Susie
with one hand and, with the other, pulled up his shirt to show he was unarmed.
“I didn’t do nothing. Why are you here?” Peña is said to have
shouted to the cops in Spanish. “This is a family dispute.” It was
moments later that neighbors heard the first “pop-pop” of gunfire.
[
When Lopez, the mother, heard the shots, she ran down the alley
to the back of the dealership. By that time, the two officers had called for
and received backup, and one of the new group informed Lopez she had to go home.
“There’s a baby in there,” Lopez says she told the cops. “Don’t
shoot! Don’t shoot, there’s a baby!”
Back at her house, Lopez reached Peña on the phone at around
4:45 p.m. “Do you have a gun?” she asked him. Peña said no,
but Lopez persisted. “Well, if you have it,” she said in Spanish,
“just put it on the floor. And give me the baby. I’m coming for the baby.”
Peña told her that the baby was fine and, according to Lopez, put Susie
on the phone. Lopez heard the baby chirp, “Hi, Mommy,” for the last
time in her life. After that, Peña repeated, “Just tell the police
to go away.” But by then, events were moving with the force and speed of
a freight train.
It is undisputed that there were three episodes of shooting, the
second occurring shortly after 5 p.m. By this time, snipers were on rooftops,
SWAT officers at the perimeters, and the police had set up a command center
at 103rd Street and Avalon, from which they phoned Peña and urged him
to surrender. During this same period, Lorena Lopez’s younger brother Joshua
Lopez, 23, also tried unsuccessfully to get the cops to let him talk to Peña
over the PA system. “Actually, I wanted to talk to him face-to-face,”
says Joshua. “I know I could have made him understand. And I know he never
would have done harm to his daughter.”
Asked why they refused such requests, the police say they felt any civilian
interference was too great a risk. “That sort of thing works well on TV,”
says Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger, who was also at the scene. “But it’s
different in real life. We don’t know who has a good relationship and who doesn’t.
If you bring in the wrong person, then all of a sudden the bottom falls out,
and what do you have then?”
Instead, the police continued to importune Peña to give
up his weapons and let the teenage girl and the baby out. Finally, at around
5:15, under cover of police gunfire, stepdaughter Ilsy dashed from the dealership
building to the southwest corner of the lot, where she lay down on the ground,
and was dragged out by officers through a gap in the gate while clutching a
rope. Then, police say, Peña came out and began shooting again — this
time at the teenager — and again the cops shot back.
After that, according to LAPD spokesman Lieutenant Paul Vernon,
things grew liquid and perilous. “You always go for the three C’s: containment,
control and communication.” But police had no practical way of containing
Peña, says Vernon. “We felt he was putting the entire neighborhood
at risk with his shooting. Otherwise we would have had more time for negotiation.”
The family says Peña never shot at neighbors, only at the
police, and then only after he was boxed in and desperate. Lopez says she talked
to Peña once more, at which time his mood had deteriorated. “Give
me my baby. It will be okay,” Lopez cried miserably to the father. Peña
didn’t buy it. “They’re never going to let me out of this,” he said.
A tactical alert was called at 5:40 p.m. The number of officers
had swelled to 80 or 100, maybe more. Police say they last talked to Peña
on the phone at 5:30 p.m. but still used the PA system to urge him to surrender
his weapons. In response, a witness reports hearing Peña shout over and
over, as in a B movie, “I’m not going to jail! You’re not going to take
me alive!”
Finally, a few minutes after 6 p.m., it all went bad. Police say
that they saw Peña at the back of the property and that shots were exchanged,
but then he disappeared inside the building. “Truthfully, we aren’t yet
entirely sure what went on,” says Deputy Chief Paysinger. “You’d think
we’d know it all by now, but we don’t. We will unravel all the facts, but it
takes a while.”
[
It is known that shortly before 6:30 p.m. a group of SWAT officers
stormed into the dealership from the back alley, believing that Peña
might be wounded and that immediate action was their last, best chance of getting
baby Susie out alive. It didn’t work. Instead of capturing or killing Peña,
a close-quarters firefight ensued, with 60 or so rounds fired in and around
the confines of the small side office where Peña wrote out the buyers’
contracts for his customers. “There were so many shots,” says a neighbor,
who watched much of the tragedy unfold from her balcony. “It felt like
hundreds of shots, but it’s hard to tell. You just hear all that noise, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa!
And you think, Oh, my God, where is the baby? How can the baby survive all those
bullets?” When the pops and booms stopped, one SWAT officer was wounded
in the shoulder, and Peña was lying motionless behind his desk. His baby
daughter was next to the door, her blood and brain matter spattering some fallen
paperwork.
Lorena Lopez heard the news from a female crisis counselor who
came to the house early Sunday evening. “Baby Susie is dead,” said
the woman. Lopez stumbled backward into her living room, her arms outstretched
as if warding off evil. “No!!!” she screamed. “No-o-ooooooo!!!”
Both 15-year-old Ronald and Joshua, her 23-year-old, tried to comfort Lopez,
but she would not let anybody touch her now.
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The unassailable truth of how Susie died — physically and strategically
— will eventually be learned through investigative reports that will spill out
in stages in the days and weeks to come. Chief Bratton acknowledges on Tuesday
that it’s “likely” an LAPD bullet killed the baby. On Wednesday, he
all but confirms it. Bratton has also dialed back his anger, announcing that
the department would do “outreach to the various communities involved.”
Yet, he states that the car lot’s security cameras show that Peña had
Susie in his arms all the time, even when he was shooting. Then when a reporter
makes a sniping remark about officers’ attitudes, Assistant Chief George Gascon,
standing next to Bratton, snaps back with uncharacteristic emotion, “We’re
devastated by the outcome,” he says. “I’m a parent. The officers on
the entry team were there to save lives. They share that mother’s anguish.”
Sixteen-year-old Ilsy has been hospitalized for stress, and the
extended family continues to grieve and gather. It seems Peña had three
children by another relationship and, on Monday, the two little girls, ages
4 and 5, and a son, 9, all mill like a trio of lost ducklings around the shooting
scene, the 4-year-old clutching a stuffed pink poodle as she announces to no
one in particular, “My daddy’s dead.”
Lorena Lopez still can’t bear to go to the dealership but, instead,
sways unsteadily in the back yard of her house, waiting to meet with heavy-hitter
lawyer Luis Carrillo, who has agreed to represent the family’s interests. Yet
before the lawyer can arrive, Lopez glances down at her blue cotton top, where
a wet spot has suddenly bloomed at the center of one breast. Lorena gazes at
the spot, stricken. “My milk,” she whispers. Then the words become
a keening. “My milk!” With that, Lorena Lopez falls against her sister,
sobbing.
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