A crew of California cops who fired 103 bullets at the wrong vehicle, hitting a mother and daughter, will not face any charges.
Los Angeles Police Department officers were on high alert in February 2013 when killer Christopher Dorner was on the run for murdering two cops and two of their loved ones after getting fired from the police force.
An unknowing mother and daughter were on a paper route when they threw a paper out of their truck window during the police hunt. When the paper hit the ground, one officer mistook it for a gunshot. The officer opened fire on the truck and seven other cops joined in, firing 103 shots total and injuring Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71. Incredibly, Carranza was only hurt by broken glass, while her mother Emma was shot in the back. Both women survived.
The L.A. district attorney’s office announced Wednesday there would not be criminal charges against any of the officers, The Los Angeles Times reports. The city gave the women a settlement of $4.2 million in April of 2013.
“Assuming, for argument’s sake, that the officers reasonably believed that the vehicle contained Dorner, logic follows that, under the legal principles invoked when attempting to capture a fleeing felong, the officers would be entitled to use deadly force to capture him,” the district attorney’s office said in a report announcing the decision.
Dorner was finally surrounded by police in a cabin where he fatally shot himself in 2013.
“They truly thought that they were fighting Chris Dorner at that moment,” Gary Fullerton, an attorney for the officers, told the Los Angeles Times. “When they realized what they did, they all felt terrible .… But at the time that they did it, they felt absolutely that they had to do what they had to do.”
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