After deliberating for more than a day, a Los Angeles County judge found Thursday that an LAPD officer is not guilty of the 2021 death of Valentina Orellana-Peralta, 14, who was killed when a bullet was fired by a police officer rushing to confront a suspect who entered the wall of a North Hollywood department store where he was hiding.
Assistant City Atty. Christian Bojorquez in his closing statement to the judge said that Officer William Jones believed he was dealing with a man with a gun who had attacked several people in the store. That information turned out to be wrong: The suspect, Daniel Elena-Lopez, was carrying a bike lock, not a gun.
But Bojorquez argued that the jury was only required to judge Jones based on the knowledge he had at the time, not the benefit of hindsight.
Slowing down in such situations could have put the lives of others at risk, the lawyer said.
Bojorquez said Jones should be commended for “trying to help people, putting himself at risk.” He seemed bored when he added that Jones was “just trying to do the right thing for the community.”
The video released by the Los Angeles Police Department showed that when Jones arrived at the scene, armed with a high-powered rifle, he attacked a group of police officers heading to the furniture store, and opened fire immediately when he met Elena-Lopez.
One of the rounds Jones fired “skipped” the floor tile, the attorney general’s report said, and sailed into the measurement room where Valentina Orellana-Peralta was hiding with her mother. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
When it was his turn to testify last month, Jones testified that he believed he was in a hurry to shoot. He told jurors that when he first saw Elena-Lopez standing in the road, he thought the suspect was holding a gun.
The shooting caused widespread outrage and grief, leading to criminal charges against Jones. The Orellana-Peralta family in their lawsuit alleges that a failure of training and supervision contributed to the fatal outcome.
Although an internal LAPD review team is divided on whether Jones’ decision to open fire was justified, then-Chief Michel Moore ultimately ruled in 2022 that the shooting violated department policy and that the officer should have taken more time to assess the situation. In a rare departure from the chief, the Police Commission concluded that only Jones’ second and third shootings were unlawful.
Orellana-Peralta was a bystander at the store, which was packed with shoppers buying last-minute Christmas gifts. He had arrived from his native Chile about six months ago, his family said, with dreams of becoming an engineer and an American citizen. According to her family’s lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court two years ago, the girl’s mother “watched her daughter die in her arms.”
The live-streamed trial began April 8 in a cramped second-floor courtroom in Burbank.
In his opening statements, Haytham Faraj, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Orellana-Peralta and her mother were hiding in a second-floor locker room during the chaos of the police response.
“They believe that will protect them. And they would be safe, if the responding LAPD officers would follow the rules and policies that are in place for this type of situation,” Faraj said.
During a radio broadcast from that day, he asked the jurors to pay attention to the information coming over the police radio. At one point, the police showed up and a man wearing a mask reported that he saw the suspect inside holding a bicycle lock.
Throughout the nearly month-long trial, the family’s legal team sought to portray Jones as the out-of-control, reckless and negligent police officer who caused the girl’s death.
The body-worn camera videos of the various police officers who responded are prominent in the case. Lawyers on both sides played and replayed the footage, sometimes slowing it down to a millisecond to show how Jones and his colleagues affected the incident.
Jones, who arrived at the scene with his teammates a few minutes after the others, was seen running to the front where the diamond was being formed without being told to do so. The plaintiff’s attorneys said that by their count, other officers could be heard telling Jones to “slow down!” at least 22 times.
