Shot by Officer : Dog’s Death Gives Life to Controversy

Irene Arroyo, who owns a millinery shop across the street, couldn’t bring herself to come to the window.

“One of my girls said, ‘Irene, the police just shot the dog.’ I wouldn’t look.”

She knew the dog, Arroyo said. He was no more than a year old and “a good dog . . . real friendly.” He apparently had been abandoned near Grand Avenue and 7th Street a few days earlier.

“He was waiting for a new owner, following people and waiting to see if they wanted to adopt him. When they wouldn’t he’d sit there and cry. . . . “

Arroyo and other business people and customers who saw the shooting Saturday in the 700 block of South Grand, are upset. They think there must have been a better way for officers to roust a few winos and a mutt.

A Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said Tuesday that the officer feared that he was about to be attacked by the dog and fired one shot, striking the dog in the chest, killing him. Comdr. William Booth added that the shooting is being investigated like any other incident in which an officer fires his weapon.

Adopted by Transients

When the dog, a 50-pound black Labrador, showed up on Grand Avenue the transients sort of adopted him. “He found us and fell in love with us,” said the one who calls himself Harmonica Joe.

Joe said he and his friends were working on a bottle of wine Saturday in front of a parking lot that serves the nearby jewelry mart, but he doesn’t figure there is any harm to that. “We been drinking on the street down here for four years,” he said.

And Joe and the others had been arrested there before, but this time it was different.

Robin Shirley, an office administrative assistant, watched from a third-floor window of the millinery shop.

She said she saw a couple of transients--one of them an old man--sitting against a wire fence in front of a jewelry mart parking lot. “The dog stood up and took two steps toward the policeman,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing the officer draw his gun. He just blew him away. . . . The dog took a couple steps backwards and died in the old man’s arms.”

Another witness, Long Beach truck driver Robert Hancock, said he was in his car about 10 feet away when the shot was fired.

“We saw two officers harassing some transients for drinking in public,” he said. “One officer threw a bum on the ground . . . and dragged him over to the fence. He (the policeman) stepped back away from the transient.”

‘Dog in a Playful Mood’

Hancock said the dog walked toward the man next to the fence. “The dog was not attacking the officer,” he said. “The dog wasn’t lunging at him. The dog was in a playful mood. He was wagging his tail and having a good time.”

Hancock said the officer “hesitated, for maybe 15 seconds like he was thinking about it, then drew his gun and shot the dog.”

Booth said Officers Joe Diaz, an eight-year-veteran, and Lewis Parker, with 14 years on the force, were in a patrol car on Hill Street when they saw “five regulars drinking from wine bottles.”

The transients, Booth said, were accompanied by a dog that officers assumed to be unlicensed and without proper vaccinations.

“They (the two officers) knew these guys and had arrested them before (for public intoxication) and were in the process of arresting them again . . . when one of the arrestees, who perhaps had imbibed a little more than the others, pushed Officer Diaz.”

Booth said Diaz “restrained him (the transient) and sat him down on the sidewalk. The dog broke loose and advanced toward Officer Diaz. The officer said the dog’s fangs were bared and he was growling. Diaz, fearing he was going to be bitten, shot the dog in the chest from one or two feet away.”

Diaz fired once, the round going through the dog, striking the pavement and ricocheting off the side of Hancock’s car, Booth said.

Booth said Central Division supervisors are investigating the incident and their report will go up through the chain of command to the department’s officer-involved shooting board, Chief Daryl F. Gates and the Police Commission.

The case, Booth said, will get “the same kind of review as an officer-involved shooting of a person.”