14-year-old girl killed by police stray bullet in Los Angeles store

It’s a new drama in the United States. On December 23, a 14-year-old girl was killed in a store in North Hollywood, near Los Angeles. She was mown down by a stray bullet fired by a police officer responding to an assault in the same store. According to the statement released on Monday, the police had been called to “an armed attack”. Upon arrival, the police discovered a woman in blood on the shelves of the store. “suffering from various injuries” but conscious, a few meters from the suspect. According to the on-board camera videos made public, one of the police officers almost immediately opened fire on him three times with a rifle, fatally hitting him.

Nevertheless, “unbeknownst to the police, a 14 year old girl was in a dressing room on the other side of a wall directly behind the suspect”, Los Angeles police said. It was only after the shooting that officers discovered the teenager had been shot dead, she said. According to the first elements of the investigation, “It appears that the victim was struck by a bullet which ricocheted off the ground and penetrated the wall of the dressing room”, can we read in a press release.

The victim, Valentina Orellana-Peralta, was shopping with her mother in preparation for her fifteenth birthday, the “Quinceañera”, an extremely important coming of age ceremony in Latin America and among some Hispanic communities in the United States. United States.

After this tragedy, yet another involving firearms since the start of the year, the Los Angeles police chief apologized to the family and pledged to shed light on “on the circumstances which led to this tragedy”. It is “a chaotic incident which resulted in the death of an innocent child”, he still lamented.

While the investigation is still in its infancy, emergency calls, radio exchanges, images from on-board cameras and CCTV were made public on Monday. In her call to the police, a store worker said the man was brandishing a heavy bicycle lock that he was using to try to assault customers. In another emergency call, a client mentioned a gun and shots, but no gun was found at the scene.

The suspect, 24 years old and already prosecuted for acts of violence, was first stationed at the foot of an escalator where he had attacked two clients, trying to take their bags. Visibly very agitated and in a daze, he then took off his pants before going upstairs, CCTV footage shows. It was there that he attacked a third victim from behind, repeatedly hitting her on the head with his padlock.

One of the main civil rights organizations for Hispanic Americans, Lulac, strongly criticized the conditions under which the police intervened on Monday. “It is unacceptable that Los Angeles police officers were able to open fire in a crowded store at the height of Christmas shopping without knowing for sure whether the suspect was armed,” lambasted its president, Domingo Garcia.