The assailant had the same name as the officer responsible for the hit-and-run collision with the Mazda: Alberto Lopez. The difference was that this Alberto Lopez was the daddy of the driver, and like his son he is a veteran police officer. After the younger Lopez rear-ended the Mazda, he went running to his daddy at a local police station, and the two of them went out in pursuit of the victims — not to offer compensation for the injury, but instead to deal out some “street justice.”
As is the case in almost all such incidents, Lawless — the victim — was charged with “assaulting” a police officer. And like most police officers in such circumstances, Lopez pere perjured himself.
At a preliminary hearing he testified that, after seeing the Mazda in the parking lot, he entered the store and ordered Lawless and her friends to hit the floor. Lawless supposedly
“freaked out, started punching, slapping and kicking me multiple times.” Based on that testimony, Judge Robert Blasi ordered that the case proceed to trial. Charges were dropped four days later, however, after the store’s surveillance video was made available.
The video corroborates the accounts of Lawless, her three friends, and Carlos Ruiz, the clerk who was on duty at the time. It shows the elder Lopez approaching Lawless from behind, a drawn gun in his hand, and grabbing her neck.
“I was really confused,” Lawless recalled. “I didn’t know if we were getting robbed. I remember seeing his uniform on his arm, he swung me around and hit me with his arm. He hit me first with an open hand, then he hit me with his gun in the face.”
According to Lawless, Lopez was shouting, “You think you can hit my son and get away with it, you think you can f*** with me?” Her account was corroborated by Ruiz, the store clerk.
The melee continued for more than a minute, with the two Officers Lopez working in tandem. After more police arrived, Lopez, Jr. told Ruiz to “do himself a favor and get rid of the camera tapes.” That suggestion was repeated during two separate visits to the store by police; during one visit they urged him to “help the cop out and testify for the cop.”
In his initial report of the incident, Lopez, Sr. mentioned the fender-bender, but didn’t identify his son as the other party involved in the incident, referring to him only as “the witness.” In his version, one of the occupants of the Mazda threatened to pull a gun on him. Furthermore, after Lawless and her friends were arrested, Ruiz heard the elder Lopez tell his son, in Spanish, to “Say he [one of Lawless' friends] had a gun.”
Lawless spent the night in a feculent, rat-infested jail cell. Although both Officers Lopez face possible disciplinary action, the District Attorney, after reviewing the matter, chose not to prosecute.
Lawless, who later moved to Florida, said she was emotionally traumatized and now fears the police — an entirely justifiable reaction to the unalloyed thuggery and practiced dishonesty that resulted in her night in jail. She is just one of a growing number of people who can testify, from experience, that we should never believe the uncorroborated word of a police officer.
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