THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS WITH THE EL MONTE POLICE

Imagine the man on the witness stand is accused of killing another man, and
has pleaded not guilty, contending that he acted in fear of his own life.
The prosecutor asks: "Sir, you told several versions of what happened that
night.

Initially, you said you believed the victim had a gun and was about to
shoot, and so you shot him first. "Then you told investigators, Well, he
didn't actually have a gun, but it looked like he was reaching for what
could have been a gun, and so you shot him. "Finally, five days after the
incident, we hear from you that the victim's wife tackled you as the victim
appeared to be going for a gun, and you shot him. "Now sir, which is the truth?

Which one, which ones, would you have the jury believe?" Stop imagining.

Now we are in the court of public opinion, hearing similar accounts about
the El Monte police SWAT team. The dead man is Mario Paz, the 65-year-old
man killed in his underwear when SWAT shot off the locks and burst in an
hour before midnight on Aug. 9, looking for drug evidence that wasn't there.
And you, the public, are the jury. Which version would you be inclined to
accept? Or would you side with Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass Queen, who has
sometimes "believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast"?

So now there are three written versions, or perhaps three elaborations of
one version, of what happened on Aug. 9, when Mario Paz was shot and killed
by cops serving a warrant for a drug suspect who had used Paz's Compton
address for his mail. The first was issued by investigators at 8:45 a.m. on
Aug. 10, about nine hours after Paz died. El Monte SWAT officers entered a
bedroom of the Paz home and "saw Paz. Believing he was armed with a weapon,
one of the officers fired from his duty weapon striking Paz in the upper
torso. . . . Detectives recovered several firearms, one of which was loaded,
in proximity to suspect Paz." The second was issued at 1:20 p.m. on Aug. 26.
By then, it had become obvious that the Paz house held no drugs, no evidence
of drug trafficking; the dead man was accorded the courtesy of being called
"Mr. Paz." "Officers ordered [the couple] numerous times in both English and
Spanish to comply with their orders.

Mr. Paz began to reach toward a dresser drawer on the floor adjacent to him.
One of the officers, fearing that he was arming himself, fired two rounds
striking Mr. Paz . . . two loaded handguns were found in the dresser drawer
on the floor." And a coroner's report released just this week but dated Aug.
14 quotes an El Monte detective as saying that Paz "failed to heed multiple
commands from officers to cease his furtive movements and, as the decedents
wife tackled the lead officer attempting to control the decedent, appeared
to be reaching into an area where a weapon was thought concealed, the
decedent was shot by the officer." Through the murky grammar, it is clear
that . . . nothing is clear. Tackled? Maria Luisa Paz has said from the
first that as she lay on the floor in her underpants, she grabbed an
officer's leg and pleaded for her husband's life. Why only now do we read,
and via the coroner, that police say she "tackled" the sergeant? Furtive
movements?

The coroner found that Paz was kneeling at his bedside when he was shot
twice in the back. His family's attorney, Cameron Stewart, says he was
reaching not, as police believed, for his guns, which were found in a drawer
several feet away, but for the $11,000 savings under his bed, to hand over
to the dark-garbed men Paz evidently thought were robbing him. And court
transcripts hint that a videotape of the aftermath of the Paz incident--like
a videotape of El Monte police's search of a storage room belonging to a
relative of the real drug suspect--may be blank, says Stewart. The
explanation given in court for the blank storage room video?

The foul-up of "an amateur." How is it, when everybody and his neighbor has
a home video camera trained on one another hoping for that $10,000 "funniest
home video" moment, that an "amateur" is handling critical police evidence,
and bungling it--perhaps twice? Shades of Rosemary Woods and her
ergonomically painful reach to show how she probably erased 18 1/2 crucial
minutes of a Nixon Watergate tape. Shades of Oscar Wilde, who said of
parents what could be said of videotapes, that "to lose one is a misfortune,
but to lose two smacks of carelessness." Honest people make honest mistakes.

But there's an old Russian saying: "He lies like an eyewitness." Memory is a
fragile and fallible and flexible tool. The law, if it is to be a useful
tool at all, must be a sturdier one.

Patt Morrison's column appears Fridays.