The incident happened on December 23, 2021, when Valentina Orellana Peralta and her mother were shopping for Christmas clothes at a Burlington store…reports Asian Lite News
The parents of a 14-year-old girl accidentally killed in a Los Angeles police shooting in December, have filed a lawsuit against the city and the officer who fired the fatal shot.
Soledad Peralta and Juan Pablo Orellana Larenas allege that the LAPD failed to “adequately train and supervise” the officers who confronted an assault suspect in a North Hollywood department store, the LA Times reported.
“Filing this lawsuit is the first step for Soledad and Juan Pablo in seeking the transparency and justice promised to them by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti following the fatal shooting of their daughter, Valentina,” the Associated Press quoted the statement from family’s attorney, Rahul Ravipudi, as saying.
The incident happened on December 23, 2021, when Valentina Orellana Peralta and her mother were shopping for Christmas clothes at a Burlington store in the San Fernando Valley’s North Hollywood neighborhood. They were inside a dressing room when they heard screams and Orellana Peralta locked the door, the AP reported.
Elsewhere in the store, 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez was behaving erratically and wielding a bike lock. He brutally attacked two women, including one who fell to the floor before he dragged her by her feet through the store’s aisles as she tried to crawl away.
Following 911 calls, Los Angeles police walked through the store in a formation, body-camera video shows. Officer William Dorsey Jones Jr., wielding a rifle, pushed to the front of the pack even as other officers repeatedly said “slow down” and “slow it down.”
The officers saw a woman crawling on the blood-stained floor and Lopez on the other side of the aisle, according to the video footage. “Hold up! Hold up!” another officer screamed just before Jones fired three shots.
One of the bullets went through the dressing room wall and fatally struck Orellana Peralta as her mother, Soledad Peralta, held her. Peralta “felt her daughter’s body go limp and watched helplessly as her daughter died while still in her arms,” the lawsuit states.
Police ordered Peralta to leave the dressing room and wait for “what seemed like an eternity,” according to the lawsuit. She was not told that her daughter had died.
