After deliberating for a little over a day, a Los Angeles County jury found Thursday that an LAPD officer was not liable for the death of 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was killed when a bullet fired by the officer rushing to confront a suspect went through the wall of a North Hollywood department store changing room where she was hiding.
Assistant City Attorney Christian Bojorquez argued in his closing statements to the jury that Officer William Jones believed that he was confronting a man with a gun who had already assaulted several people inside the store. That information turned out to be wrong: The suspect, Daniel Elena-Lopez, was carrying a bike lock, not a gun.
But Bojorquez contended that the jury was only required to judge Jones based on the information he had in the moment, and not with the benefit of hindsight.
To slow down in such situations could have risked the lives of others, the attorney said.
Bojorquez said that Jones should be praised for “trying to help people, putting himself in a position of peril. He appeared to get choked up when he added that Jones was “just trying to do the right thing for society.”
Video released by the Los Angeles Police Department showed that when Jones arrived at the scene, toting a high-powered rifle, he charged to the front of a phalanx of officers advancing toward the store’s home goods section, then opened fire almost immediately upon encountering Elena-Lopez.
One of rounds that Jones fired “skipped off” a floor tile, a state attorney general’s report said, and sailed into a fitting room where Valentina Orellana-Peralta was hiding with her mother. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
When it came his turn to take the witness stand last month, Jones testified that he believed he was rushing into an active shooter situation. He told jurors that when he first spotted Elena-Lopez standing in the aisle, he thought the suspect was holding a gun.
The shooting drew widespread outrage and grief, bringing demands for Jones to be criminally charged. The Orellana-Peralta family in their lawsuit alleged that failures in training and oversight contributed to the deadly outcome.
While an internal LAPD review panel was split on whether Jones’ decision to open fire was justified, then-Chief Michel Moore ultimately ruled in 2022 that the shots violated department policy and that the officer should have taken more time to assess the situation. In a rare split with the chief, the Police Commission concluded that only Jones’ second and third shots were out of policy.
Orellana-Peralta was a bystander in the store, which was teeming with shoppers buying last-minute Christmas gifts. She had arrived from her native Chile about six months prior, her family said, with dreams of becoming an engineer and a U.S. citizen. According to her family’s lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court two years ago, the girl’s mother “watched helplessly as her daughter died while still in her arms.”
The livestreamed trial kicked off April 8 in a cramped second-story courtroom in Burbank.
In his opening arguments, Haytham Faraj, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Orellana-Peralta and her mother had hidden in a changing room on the second floor amid the commotion of the police response.
“They believed that would make them safe. And they would’ve been safe, if the LAPD officers responding would have followed the rules and polices that are in place for precisely this type of situation,” Faraj said.
While playing radio transmissions from that day, he asked jurors to pay close attention to the information coming over police radio. At one point, officers are approached by a man with a mask who reported seeing a suspect inside with a bike lock.
Throughout the nearly-monthlong trial, the family’s legal team sought to depict Jones as an out-of-control officer, whose recklessness and disregard for police practices had brought about her death.
The body-worn camera videos of the various officers who responded featured heavily into the trial. Attorneys on both sides played and replayed the footage over and over, sometimes slowed down to the millisecond in order to show how Jones and his colleagues had approached the incident.
Jones, who arrived at the scene with his partner a few minutes behind the others, was seen running to the front of the diamond formation without being ordered to do so. The plaintiff’s attorneys said that by their count the other officers can be heard telling Jones to “slow down!” at least 22 times.
