Story at a glance
- Shortly before Christmas, officers responded to a potential shooter at a Burlington Coat Factory store in North Hollywood and opened fire after finding a male suspect assaulting a customer with an object.
- A teen girl was sheltering in place in the store’s dressing room when the bullet passed through the wall and hit her.
- The LAPD released security and body camera footage Monday showing an officer shooting a rifle in the direction of the suspect.
The parents of a girl shot and killed in a department store dressing room by a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer’s stray bullet are calling for justice, according to Reuters.
On Dec. 23, LAPD officers responded to reports of a possible shooting taking place in a Burlington Coat Factory store in North Hollywood where they opened fire after allegedly encountering “an individual who was in the process of assaulting another,” LAPD Capt. Stacy Spell said, ABC News reported.
Surveillance and body camera footage released by the police department on Monday shows the suspect, later identified as 24-year-old Daniel Elena-Lopez, entering the store with a bike, traveling upstairs via an escalator and later swinging a bike lock at shoppers, according to CNN.
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Video footage shows an officer firing a rifle at the suspect who then falls to the ground, according to the outlet. The suspect died at the scene.
The girl, 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, was hiding in the store’s dressing room along with her mother when one of the officer’s bullets passed through the wall and fatally struck her in the chest, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner-Examiner’s office.
“It is like my whole heart has been ripped out of my body,” the teen’s father, Juan Pablo Orellana Larenas, said in a statement read by the family’s attorney, Ben Crump, during a news conference outside of LAPD headquarters, Reuters reported. “We want justice for our daughter. Valentina’s life mattered.”
The officer who fired the round has been placed on administrative leave and an investigation into the incident is underway.
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