Frank Lyga

Infobox police officer
name = Frank Lyga


caption =
born =
died =
badgenumber =
placeofbirth = flagicon|US - Oneida County, New York, USA
placeofdeath =
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department = Los Angeles Police Department
service = United States
serviceyears = 1986 - 2001
rank = Sworn in as an Officer - 1986
- Detective I - 1990
awards =
relations =
laterwork =

Frank Lyga was an officer in the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department known for shooting and killing Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums officer Kevin Gaines. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/scandal/cron.html#rage] ] The resuting LAPD investigation of Kevin Gaines helped lead to the Rampart Scandal.

Early Career

In 1986, when Lyga joined the department, he was already an old-timer, a twenty-nine-year-old transfer from the Adirondack Mountains, where his family had farmed for generations. He was previously on a local sheriff's force in upstate New York, but he hated the cold, and he believed what he had heard about the L.A.P.D. [http://edwardlawson.com/Rampart.html Edward Lawson.com] ]

The Shooting

Gaines was shot and killed on March 18, 1997, by Lyga, who was determined to be acting in self-defense. At the time of his death, Gaines was 31 and a seven year veteran of the force. [http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/notoriousbig/articles/story/5933156/the_murder_of_the_notorious_big Rolling Stone] ] Gaines had ties to Death Row Records, the Bloods, and dated Suge Knight's ex-wife.

March 18, 1997

Lyga and other members of his team were staking out a suspected methamphetamine dealer, and Lyga was the point man, which meant sitting in his unmarked 1991 Buick Regal and waiting for a drug deal to happen, so that he could follow the suspects back to their source and make the necessary arrests.

After the operation had been called off, Lyga pulled his car onto Ventura Boulevard. While he was stopped at a red light, he heard the thumping beat of rap music at high volume emanating from a green S.U.V. that had pulled up next to him. Lyga said he glanced at the driver, a black man with a shaved head (Gaines). The driver stared back. When Lyga rolled down his window and asked, "Can I help you?," the man made a menacing gesture and said, according to Lyga, "Ain't nobody looking at you, punk." Lyga was surprised by the confrontation. He assumed that the other driver was a gang member, especially when, he said, the driver of the S.U.V. shouted, "Punk, I'll put a cap in your ass."

Lyga said he accepted a challenge from the other driver, suggesting that they pull over and fight. The driver of the S.U.V. did pull over, but Lyga drove into traffic and drove off, chuckling as he glanced at the angered driver in the rearview mirror. "I'm thinking, What an idiot, thinking I'm going to stop," Lyga recalled. "And I'm laughing, and I'm watching him in the mirror and he looked like he was going to rip the steering wheel off."

But the other driver (Gaines) pulled back into traffic, and a slow-motion chase ensued, with the S.U.V. edging through heavy traffic until it neared Lyga's car. Hoping that his fellow officers were just a few blocks behind, Lyga radioed for assistance: "Hey, I got a problem. I've got a black guy in a green Jeep coming up here! He may have a gun."

Soon, Lyga was at another stoplight, and the S.U.V. started to pull up beside him on the left. Lyga unfastened his seat belt, anticipating a violent, physical confrontation. He again called for help—using a hidden radio microphone, activated by a foot pedal—and took out his gun, placing it on his lap facing the S.U.V. Lyga could plainly see the other driver now, and saw his arm extend across the passenger seat toward Lyga's car, his hand clutching what looked to Lyga like a steel-cased .45-caliber handgun. Lyga leaned forward, out of the line of fire, and radioed again: "He's got a gun!"

Lyga said he again heard "I'll cap you," then he raised his weapon, a Beretta 9-mm, and fired into the S.U.V., missing the driver. Two seconds later, Lyga fired again, and this time, hit the man. The S.U.V. wheeled away in a U-turn, then rolled into a gas station, and stopped. Lyga radioed a last transmission: "I just shot this guy! I need help! Get up here!"

Lyga pulled into the gas station and, holding his LAPD detective's badge in his hand, yelled to a customer coming out of the station's minimart to call 911. Soon, a California Highway Patrol unit arrived, followed by Lyga's C.O. and the others on his stakeout team. Lyga had been right about his second shot—the bullet had struck the driver on his right side, puncturing his heart before stopping in his lung. Lyga had been right about the gun, too; the highway patrolmen found a stainless-steel 9-mm pistol on the floorboard of the S.U.V.

The other officers, following standard procedure, took control of the scene. A few minutes later, one of Lyga's partners approached him, and Lyga asked, "Is he dead?"

"Oh, yeah," his partner replied, "he's dead."

Lyga returned to the station and awaited instruction—there would be paperwork, and investigators would want a reenactment of the shooting. A little over two hours later, Lyga's commander, Dennis Zeuner, told him about the man he'd shot, whose name was Kevin Gaines. "The guy was a policeman," Zeuner said. "One of ours." That was when Lyga found out about Gaines's identity.

Aftermath

The next day, Lyga found media trucks parked near his home, in Ventura County. A group of African-Americans, led by Gaines's former partner, Derwin Henderson, showed up at the scene of the incident and began conducting an unofficial investigation. It was a provocative move, challenging the L.A.P.D.'s fairness in dealing with racial incidents—which is what the Lyga-Gaines shooting had now become.

Three days after the shooting, Johnnie Cochran, Jr. stepped into the case, having been hired by Gaines's family to investigate a potential claim against Lyga and the city. Cochran's first act was to commission a private autopsy of Gaines's body, which revealed, a Cochran aide suggested, that there might be problems with the official version of Gaines's death.

Headquarters instructed that Lyga's "package" be pulled, meaning that the records of his job performance were being examined. On Lyga's second day back on the job, he was assigned to a desk by the narcotics-division commander, and was told that he had a bad package—at least 40 questionable incidents. The department, in one attempt at reform, had defined "use of force" to include, in some situations, even the use of a "firm grip" to apprehend a suspect; in eleven years, Lyga had arrested many violent drug suspects who required more than a firm grip. Of those use-of-force incidents, however, four had prompted complaints of unnecessary force, but in each case Lyga was exonerated or the charges were classified as "unfounded" or "not resolved." Now, however, every use-of-force incident was examined demographically, and tested for signs of racial bias. No apparent indications were found in Lyga's case.

A week after the shooting, Kevin Gaines was buried, and his funeral was itself the cause of discord. The Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation (a black LAPD policeman's union named after a policeman killed in 1968), requested an official police funeral with full honors, a ceremony reserved for policemen killed in the line of duty. The demand posed a dilemma for the chief, Willie L. Williams, a black outsider who had been brought in from Philadelphia to head the L.A.P.D. in 1992, after the Rodney King riots forced Daryl F. Gates's resignation. In the end, Gaines received a semi-official police funeral, attended by both Williams and then-Deputy Chief Bernard C. Parks.

Two months later, Cochran filed a twenty-five-million-dollar claim against the city, charging that Lyga was "an aggressive and dangerous police officer" who had failed to summon immediate medical assistance for Gaines, contributing to his death, and that he had conspired to "hide and distort the true facts concerning the incident." District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose office had lost the O. J. Simpson case, opened a criminal investigation into the shooting.

Witnesses to various moments of the event confirmed Lyga's account, as did a surveillance camera at the minimart, which recorded the sound of Lyga firing two shots, 1.8 seconds apart. Three months after the incident, the unit investigating the shooting found that Lyga had acted according to department policy. The department's shooting board recommended no disciplinary action. But that ruling was postponed, pending results of a three-dimensional digital re-creation of the shooting.

In November, 1997, Lyga appeared again before the shooting board, which reviewed the evidence and the 3-D re-creation, and in December Bernard Parks, who had succeeded Williams as chief of police, reported that the shooting was within department policy; no action would be taken against him. The District Attorney's inquiry also eventually ruled that Lyga was not criminally liable.

Even though the re-creation of the shooting supported his story, the city and Cochran agreed to a settlement conference the following October, mediated by retired Judge R. William Schoettler, who first met separately with both sides. Cochran had reduced his request from twenty-five million dollars to eight hundred thousand; Lyga didn't want to settle at all. Cochran dropped his figure to two hundred and fifty thousand—and the city accepted.

Judge Schoettler wrote a letter to Parks telling him that he thought Lyga and the city would have won the case had it gone to trial. "Had the matter been submitted to me for a determination, I would have found in favor of the City of Los Angeles," Schoettler wrote. He added that a settlement had been proposed primarily to avoid adverse publicity, and said, "As you are aware, the settlement can be termed 'political' and neither the fact of the settlement nor the amount involved should in any way reflect upon the conduct of Detective Lyga." The "political" reason for settling the case seemed obvious: City Attorney Hahn was preparing to run for mayor, and black voters made up his principal base.

tolen Evidence

Within months of being cleared, Lyga found himself under investigation again. On March 27, 1998, one pound of cocaine evidence booked from one of Lyga's previous arrests was found missing from the Parker Center property room.

Ray Perez

Investigators eventually learned that the missing cocaine had been stolen by Rafael Perez, who they suspected, at the time, of targeting Lyga in retaliation for the shooting of Gaines. The arrest of Perez, along with Gaines's death would cause investigations that would lead to the Rampart Scandal.

References