It isn't every day that three stories cross your desk within hours or even minutes of each other, all of them involving Orange County cops beating the hell out of people, or as the case may be, killing them. And oh yeah: getting sued for their troubles, too.
Where to begin? With the the mother of the man shot by Anaheim cops suing the city? Maybe Santa Ana paying $2.45 million to the family of a woman shot dead by a police officer who has a record of shooting and ramming a man with his cruiser. Or maybe the city of Buena Park settling a lawsuit against three cops who roughed up a visitor to Knott's Scary Farm?
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From the top, then…
According to a story yesterday by CBS,
Maria Lopez has just sued Anaheim over the Aug. 16 death of her son,
David Raya. At the time, Raya was on parole and hiding out at his girlfriend's place, when cops showed up looking for him. He ran, and according to the claim filed by attorney
Richard P. Herman, who is also suing Anaheim over the Dec. 11, 2009 fatal shooting of
Cesar Cruz, the cops shot him in the back three times, killing him.
Next we go to Buena Park, where the city has just settled a lawsuit filed by
Brian Love, who was allegedly beaten up by three cops on Halloween Haunt Night 2010. Although he was arrested for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, he was acquitted of those charges and
according to a press release by his lawyers, the city just settled his suit for a confidential sum.
And finally we have Santa Ana paying out $2.45 million to the family of
Susie Young Kim, an Irvine mom who led cops on a “30-minute chase with her baby in the back seat,”
according to the Orange County Register. Looking into the incident, the
Register discovered that the same officer who shot Kim had rammed
Jose Guzman Candilla against a wall with his police cruiser in the parking lot of a
Norm's Restaurant north of downtown in 2007. The cop also apparently shot a dog in an unrelated incident.
Woof!
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).
