The police shooting outside a Sherman Oaks apartment building that left a man dead Wednesday was an arrest gone bad, a Los Angeles Police Department official said.
Detectives in plainclothes conducting an undercover surveillance of the building were attempting to stop the man, who they suspect of being behind a pair of violent crimes in the area, including the murder of a maintenance worker on Monday.
The shooting occurred as the detectives approached the man.
“They attempted to take him into custody,” said Sgt. Barry Montgomery, an LAPD spokesman, “and it simply went really bad.”
Numerous LAPD units crowded the Sherman Oaks neighborhood for much of the morning. The apartment is located near the 5400 block of Kester Avenue.
The area is the same where the dead man, identified only as being in his 20s, was accused of shooting the maintenance worker on Monday and robbing a nearby liquor store Tuesday night.
Police said a gunman approached the worker, 52-year-old Antonio Rodriguez, at around 12:25 p.m. as he stood outside an apartment building in the 14600 block of Burbank Boulevard.
He shot Rodriguez and left him dead. Police said they did not have a motive in that killing.
Montgomery provided few details on how the detectives determined the man shot on Wednesday was the suspect in the earlier killing and the robbery.
“This surveillance was driven by a whole lot of time that (the detectives) spent investigating, and evidence they collected from those crime scenes,” he said.
The detectives were posted outside the building since around 6 a.m. on Wednesday. Montgomery said he didn’t know what the connection was between the man, a Van Nuys resident, and the building.
Police have not said who fired their weapons in the shooting. Montgomery said the plainclothes detectives were involved, but not whether they were the ones who fired.
Uniformed officers arrived in patrol cars to assist in the arrest. But it’s not clear whether any of those officers may have fired, either.
Montgomery said a gun was found near where the man was killed. Whether he fired any shots had not yet been determined.
“Detectives collected that weapon…they have to test it for ballistics,” he said.
The officers involved in the shooting had not yet been interviewed as of Wednesday afternoon. Montgomery said he didn’t know yet if footage of the shooting was captured by any of the uniformed officers’ body cameras.
At nearby Myke’s Cafe, on Burbank Boulevard, things went from quiet to anxious quickly Wednesday morning.”I got very anxious,” said barista Shyamini Rivera, once she realized what had happened. “You hear shooting and automatically your heart drops … It’s right in front of you.”
Once police arrived, streets were closed off and people started streaming into the cafe, Rivera said. Patrons were asking who was shot.
A large police presence was expected to remain in the area throughout the night as detectives with LAPD’s force-investigation unit continued collecting evidence and finding witnesses.
“This is gonna take some time,” Montgomery said.
