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Community leaders pray for L.A. County sheriff’s deputies wounded in ambush
A pair of community leaders of South Los Angeles prayed outside a Lynwood hospital Monday morning, Sept. 14, for the two sheriff’s deputies recovering inside days after they were ambushed at a Compton light-rail station and left with gunshots wounds.
The well-wishers gathered outside St. Francis Medical Center to support the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies and to call for restraint from further violence.
Najee Ali, a longtime South L.A. activist, handed flowers to a deputy stationed just outside the hospital’s emergency-room entrance.
Ali said the group was there to show the deputies there were community members who supported them.
“We said a prayer,” he said. “We wanted to let the department know we’re outside praying for them. A lot of people are pulling for them.”
At 7 a.m. Saturday, the deputies were sitting in their black-and-white SUV on the east side of the Metro station on Willowbrook Avenue when a man in a sweater walked up to their open window, took out a handgun and began firing.
The man fled immediately and disappeared from the view of a security camera. One of the deputies was shot in the jaw, and the other in the head. They were expected to survive, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said.
A $175,000 reward has been set up to help capture the gunman and the driver of a vehicle he fled in.
The shooting added to the deteriorating relationship between the Sheriff’s Department’s nearby Compton station and residents. Deputies from the station have been involved in the recent fatal shootings of 18-year-old Andres Guardado in June and 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee.
Both shootings, which came amid an already roiling, national protest movement following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May, set off new demonstrations, some ending with deputies firing at protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets.
On Saturday, Sheriff Villanueva said there was nothing tying the shooting to the protests at this point, and the department had not since announced any change to that.
Ali said he had spoken to the family of Kizzee, who was shot to death by deputies on Sept. 2 as he was riding away from them on a bicycle: The family said it was very concerned about anyone using Kizzee’s death as an excuse to attack law enforcement.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said she believed anti-police rhetoric was creating “a toxic environment.”
“I support peaceful protests, but what I don’t support are the type of comments especially made outside a hospital where two individuals were fighting for their lives,” Barger said, referring to a group of men who showed up at around midnight on Sunday at St. Francis and berated deputies there. One of the men could be heard in a video saying, “We hope they die.”
The department, the sheriff said, was contacted by President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to offer their support.
Even as he prayed for the injured deputies, Ali said he believed the Sheriff’s Department needs to address brutality in its ranks.
The two deputies shot were not from the nearby Compton station.
They were assigned to the Sheriff’s Department’s bureau that patrols Metro stations in county areas and contract cities. Villanueva said both were sworn in just in the last year. One is the mother to a 6-year-old boy, the other is in his mid-20s.
Staff writer David Rosenfeld contributed to this report.