Grieving Family Baffled by Police Account of Rooftop Shooting

The mystery surrounding the fatal police shooting of a young mother on a rooftop helipad at St. Vincent Medical Center deepened Friday as Los Angeles police characterized her as a threat to officers and her 3-year-old son, while her grieving and baffled family said she was anything but.

Sonji Taylor, 27, was killed in a fusillade of bullets after police were called to the roof of the Professional Office Building on the St. Vincent campus Thursday night.

No one seemed sure of what led Taylor to the rooftop. Police said she was armed with a large butcher knife and “appeared to be threatening the child.” Police said Taylor was making irrational statements as she waved the knife in front of her son and let him go only after an officer doused her with pepper spray.

After that, according to the police account, Taylor released her son, raised the knife, and advanced on Sgt. Michael Long, an 18-year veteran. Another officer, Craig Liedahl, a 15-year veteran of the department, fired seven rounds at Taylor and Long fired twice.

Taylor’s 3-year-old son, Jeremy, was not injured, nor were at least four hospital employees who witnessed the shooting.

Taylor’s mother, Geri Dixon, had trouble reconciling the official police account with the daughter she knew. “I don’t understand. No, I can’t believe that. She loved Jeremy like nobody else. They can’t make me believe that she was threatening. I’m not believing that.”

Dixon, an office manager for the federal Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement in Commerce, said that El Monte police came to her home about 1:30 a.m. Friday, but that LAPD detectives did not tell her her daughter was dead until 4 a.m.

“It’s fishy,” she said. “They didn’t really tell me nothing. I’m too devastated. I didn’t even know what to ask. All I asked was, ‘Did you have to kill her?’ ”

Dixon said her daughter was in the final stages of accepting a job as a state corrections officer and had been scheduled to take a physical exam for the job last Monday. State corrections officials could not be reached for comment.

Dixon said that she had no idea what her daughter could have been doing at St. Vincent Medical Center on Thursday evening. A hospital spokeswoman said Taylor had no connection with St. Vincent, nor had she been seeing any of the doctors there.

Dixon said the last time she saw her daughter was Sunday night, for a lasagna dinner cooked by Taylor.

“It was like always,” Dixon said. “We were all laughing and talking, just like we always do.”

Dixon said Taylor, who lived around the corner from her mother and stepfather in El Monte, had been working as a preschool teacher in San Marino. (A school administrator said she had no record of Taylor’s employment.) Dixon said Taylor had not been in touch with Jeremy’s father for about a year.

“(The police) told me she had a knife and charged,” Dixon said. “They said that Jeremy was in her arms and that they got him out of her arms. I didn’t know anything about the pepper spray or any of the rest. If they could get (her son) out of her arms, why didn’t they just shoot her in the leg or something? Why didn’t they just cripple her? Why did they have to kill her?”

Police Commission President Gary Greenebaum said the incident would be reviewed to determine whether the shooting was justified, and why the pepper spray--a new addition to the LAPD’s arsenal of non-lethal weapons--apparently failed to subdue Taylor.

Among the issues to be reviewed: Why did officers fire nine times? “That always raises flags,” Greenebaum said. “There may be reasons why that was appropriate, and there may not.”

Police Lt. John Dunkin, a department spokesman, said Taylor’s killing will be investigated, as are all other officer-involved shootings, and the two officers will be removed from duty until an internal investigation determines they are ready to resume work. The district attorney is also investigating, as is the practice in officer-involved shootings that result in serious injury or death.

An LAPD source familiar with the shooting said it has already attracted concern from “high-level” members of the department.

A number of police officers witnessed the shooting and are being questioned to determine whether Taylor actually lunged at the officers and was a genuine threat to them, the source added.

Scott Carrier, spokesman for the coroner’s office, said that a routine toxicology report will be released. But Taylor’s mother dismissed the suggestion that her daughter--who, like her family, was a member of a Pentecostal religion--may have been using drugs. Moreover, she said, if her daughter had been using drugs she would not have passed the background checks required for employment as a state corrections officer.

Dixon said her daughter graduated from Fresno State University with a degree in liberal arts.

Taylor’s son, who witnessed his mother’s death, has been asking about her and does not understand what happened to her, Dixon said. The boy is staying with Dixon.

“We’re all in shock,” Dixon said. “It isn’t the kind of thing that would happen to Sonji.”