CITY NEWS SERVICE
A 71-year-old woman remained hospitalized this morning with two gunshot wounds she suffered when Los Angeles police detectives on the lookout for Christopher Jordan Dorner opened fire on her pickup truck as she and her daughter were delivering The Los Angeles Times in Torrance.
Emma Hernandez and her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, were shot at on Redbeam Avenue in Torrance before dawn Thursday. Hernandez was twice hit in the back, according to her attorney, and was reported Thursday night to be stable. Her daughter received stitches on her finger.
“The problem with the situation is, it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn’t take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don’t look like a large black man,” attorney Glen T. Jonas, who is representing the victims, told The Los Angeles Times. Dorner is black, 6 feet tall and 270 pounds.
“We trust that the LAPD will step up and do the right thing and acknowledge that what they did was unacceptable, and we’ll deal with it,” Jonas said.
Police Chief Charlie Beck on Thursday called the Torrance shooting “a case of mistaken identity.”
Sources told The Times that the detectives involved in the shooting were on protective detail for a police official named in an online manifesto that authorities say Dorner posted to a Facebook page Monday. He has vowed to go on a killing spree in retaliation for having been fired from the LAPD and is accused of killing three people since Sunday, including Monica Quan, an assistant women’s basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, and her fiancé, Keith Lawrence.
Shortly after the women delivering papers were fired on, two Torrance police officers in a cruiser saw a truck that also looked to them like Dorner’s “suddenly leaving” the area where the LAPD detectives had opened fire, according to a Torrance Police Department statement.
The squad car collided with the black truck, “and an officer-involved shooting occurred,” according to the statement, but no one was hurt, either by the gunfire or the collision’s impact.