Police Kill Armed Man in Stolen Truck

Los Angeles police shot and killed an armed man in a stolen pickup truck at a busy Encino strip mall parking lot, officials said Thursday.

The man, whom police have not identified, had illegally parked the pickup truck in a spot reserved for the disabled outside Barnes & Noble bookstore in the 16500 block of Ventura Boulevard, said Officer Nadine Hernandez, a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman. The truck had been reported stolen and was used in an earlier theft, she said.

Officer Jeffrey Douglas Ingalls and his partner, Officer Patrick Joseph Merrin, were waiting for the man to come out of the bookstore about 9 p.m. Wednesday. When the officers approached him, he got in the truck and closed the door. Ingalls shattered the driver-side window with his nightstick, and as he reached in, he saw the man was armed, said Sgt. John Pasquariello, an LAPD spokesman.

Ingalls fired his gun once, striking the man in the chest.

Pasquariello said the officers then took cover behind other vehicles and waited for backup.

“The truck had tinted windows, and [the officers] could see he was still moving inside with a gun,” Pasquariello said. “Unless we have good eyes on a suspect, we regard him like he is barricaded in a house.”

Ingalls and Merrin called the department’s SWAT team, which removed the man’s body from the truck at 11:55 p.m., Hernandez said.

The officers involved were not injured, and the department’s robbery-homicide division is investigating the shooting. Both officers remain on duty, but will not return to street patrol until they have completed a standard departmental psychiatric evaluation, Pasquariello said.

Ingalls, a six-year department veteran, received an administrative disapproval in 1998 after a fellow officer, Erik Cortes, inadvertently pulled the trigger of Ingalls’ semiautomatic pistol.

The two were in the restroom of a Hermosa Beach tavern when Cortes, while trying to remove Ingalls’ gun from its holster, shot Ingalls in the hand, according to a department memo. A bullet fragment also struck Ingalls in the neck, the memo stated.

The incident occurred while the two officers were drinking with friends and discussing the merits of various weapons, according to the memo.