LAPD disciplinary panel decides detective should be fired

A Los Angeles Police Department disciplinary panel Wednesday decided that a detective should be fired for leaking confidential information about the investigation into a relative’s murder.

The final say on Det. Michael Slider’s career rests with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, who can affirm the firing or impose a lesser punishment on the 22-year veteran.

Slider’s case stems from a night in September 2006 when his teenage niece, Khristina Henry, was robbed at gunpoint outside a bowling alley near Los Angeles International Airport.

Henry and another witness identified the gunman to LAPD detectives as Tyquan Knox, a former high school football star.

In the weeks after the crime, associates of Knox repeatedly contacted Henry and her mother, Pamela Lark, authorities said.

The mother and daughter complained to Slider that they feared for their safety and were having difficulty getting help from the detectives assigned to the case.

Slider called the detectives’ supervisor several times in an effort to draw more attention to the case and warn about the potential for retaliation by Knox.

In early January, days before Henry was scheduled to testify against Knox in a preliminary hearing, Lark was gunned down outside her apartment.

The robbery and its tragic fallout were the subject of a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times.

A jury deadlocked in November on whether Knox robbed Henry and was responsible for Lark’s murder. He is awaiting a second trial on the charges.

Slider opted to allow a reporter and others to sit in on the two-day disciplinary hearing that the department would have otherwise held in private.

He acknowledged during the hearing that he accessed an internal computer system used by LAPD detectives to store case notes and printed a copy of investigation notes from the robbery file.

And he admitted that he gave the document to a lawyer, whom family members had hired to begin the process of bringing a lawsuit against the department.

Saying he was blinded by grief and anger, Slider told the three-member disciplinary panel he had hoped leaking the internal document would help spur an investigation into the detectives’ handling of the case.

He said he was not motivated by the possibility of winning a monetary award -- a claim the head of the panel said he believed.

Nonetheless, Slider’s hope that his openness, testimony by several superiors about his integrity and work ethic, and the extreme circumstances that led him to act, would win him some leniency was not fulfilled.

The two LAPD command staff members on the panel called for him to be fired, saying Slider had not shown enough remorse for his actions.

“I am extremely disappointed that, in the end, my 20-plus years of service meant nothing to them,” said Slider, 47.

The third panelist, former Los Angeles City Council member and former Los Angeles County Supervisor Edmund Edelman, dissented from the majority’s finding, saying he thought the punishment was too harsh.

joel.rubin@latimes.com