In this instance, there is a detail that remains in my memory because it is both so commonplace and so tragic all at once. Valentina Orellana-Peralta and her mother were in a second-floor dressing room at a Victory Boulevard boutique in Burlington, putting on Christmas gowns. Two days before to the holiday, on December 23. The most boring activity in the world is being done by a fourteen-year-old and her mother.
Then, as she was in her mother’s arms, an LAPD officer fired a bullet that bounced off the floor, passed through the fitting room wall, and killed her. The body of Soledad Peralta’s daughter went limp. That picture served as the focal point of a wrongful-death trial that concluded on May 7 when a jury, after just over a day of deliberation, found the city of Los Angeles not guilty by a vote of 9-3.
The verdict is of the type that is both emotionally difficult to accept and legally defendable, and the difference between the two is the whole narrative. William Dorsey Jones Jr., the officer, was reacting to a real emergency. The body-camera film that was shown in court showed the precise turmoil that occurred when a man called Daniel Elena-Lopez attacked two women inside the store, beating one of them.
In his testimony, Jones stated that he thought he was racing into an active-shooter scenario and that he thought Lopez’s bike lock was a gun. He fired three times. Lopez was killed by one round. One bounced off a tile in the floor and went through the wall of the dressing room. Nine out of twelve jurors found that the officer was not negligent when given a specific legal question.
This is particularly challenging because the jury’s verdict directly contradicts the conclusions drawn years ago by the LAPD’s own monitoring bodies. In 2022, the civilian commission that oversees these shootings, the Los Angeles Police Commission, determined that while Jones’s initial shot was lawful, his two subsequent shots were not. In his own study, then-Police Chief Michel Moore went farther and concluded that none of the three rounds were warranted. Neither the family’s attorneys nor activists came to such findings.
The department’s internal accountability structures have reached those conclusions. However, a civil jury that used the legal standard of negligence instead of departmental policy came to a different conclusion. Try explaining that distinction to a mother who witnessed her daughter’s death. The criteria are actually different—being out of policy is not the same as being criminally irresponsible.
Nick Rowley, the family’s lawyer, described it as “the most devastating loss of my career” and stated unequivocally that he doesn’t comprehend the jury’s verdict. The visceral mismatch at the center of the case was a key component of his trial strategy. “You don’t bring an AR-15 to a bike lock fight,” he informed reporters. While body-camera footage was playing, the family’s attorneys displayed a wooden model of the gun in the courtroom early in the proceedings. The argument was that Jones was careless and that discharging a weapon at a man with a bike lock in a busy retail establishment without knowing what was behind him violated the legal standard of care. No one argued that Jones intended to harm Valentina. By a slim margin, the jury disagreed.
The statement from the city was well-written and worth carefully reading. Los Angeles shares the family’s sorrow, according to City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, but the jury made the right choice by portraying Jones as an officer who “answered the call” and ran toward danger when others fled. He will have “the burden of Valentina’s death with him for many years,” she said.
That statement can be interpreted as either sincere or as institutional self-defense, and to be honest, it’s probably both at once. Officers do flee from peril. Additionally, the institution has every reason to fight a $100 million verdict, because both the legal interest and the anguish of people happen to point in the same direction.
Before the civil trial started, the criminal track had already closed. Because Jones acted with what he reasonably believed to be an imminent threat of death or serious damage and because the evidence did not prove criminal activity beyond a reasonable doubt, the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta declined to bring charges in April 2024.
Therefore, two of the three potential channels of accountability—criminal charges and departmental approval—had already sent conflicting messages by the time the civil case reached a jury. According to the chief and commission, the shooting was mostly inappropriate. According to the AG, it wasn’t illegal. It was not even negligent, according to a civil jury. One deceased child, three distinct corpses, three distinct standards, and three distinct responses
