Lawsuit: Cops Stood By While Elderly Woman Was Stabbed 68 Times; Cops: Hey, We Yelled At The House
from the suddenly-incapable-of-a-forcible-entry dept
This isn’t a good look for the Las Vegas Metro PD, even if it’s completely supported by court precedent. No matter how often law enforcement agencies sling around the phrase “protect and serve,” they have almost no legal obligation to do either of those things.
Sometimes a “failure to intervene” allegation might undermine a cop’s attempt to secure qualified immunity for violations committed by other cops, but when it comes to crimes being committed against regular people, cops simply aren’t legally obliged to stop crimes in progress even when they’re already at the scene.
But this lawsuit is hoping a court might find otherwise. Whether or not it does, it will definitely expose some cops for what they are: lazy opportunists who aren’t really in the life-saving business. Even if the officers are found to be on the right side of judicial precedent, they’re not going to come out of this looking like people who should be employed as police officers.
Las Vegas police officers stood outside listening as a 74-year-old woman was stabbed 68 times and killed by one of her sons in her home, a lawsuit filed Saturday alleged.
How the Metropolitan Police Department responded to the event prompted the woman’s other sons to file a lawsuit alleging, among other things, negligence and wrongful death.
[…]
Bonilla was arrested and booked on one charge of murder of an elderly or protected person. After pleading guilty in 2023, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Pablo Bonilla — someone well known to Las Vegas law enforcement — murdered his mother in a most horrific manner. Then he walked out the door and surrendered to the law enforcement officers who just basically hung out outside of the house and waited for the murder-in-progress to resolve itself.
They can’t even say they tried everything they could to prevent this murder from happening. The officers’ report makes it clear they did nothing more than shout in the direction of the house from the safety of their cop car. And in all my years of reporting on police misconduct, I have never seen this particular description of officers’ (in)action:
Bonilla’s arrest report said that officers “challenged the apartment” using a vehicle bullhorn because the apartment’s patio and front door were guarded by metal gates. About 30 minutes after they arrived, they heard Zuniga screaming for help, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, Bonilla appeared at the doorway of the apartment, covered in blood, police said. He was taken into custody.
What even the fuck is that. The apartment wasn’t murdering Paula Prada Zuniga. Her son was. And since when have mental gates on doors and patios ever stopped cops from performing forced entries? Because if that’s all it takes to stop cops from entering residences, every criminal in America can ensure undisturbed criminal activity in perpetuity with a very small investment in security non-tech.
Trust me, these cops would have blown past the supposedly impassable metal gates in a heartbeat if they thought there was cash to seize or drugs to bust or a warrantless search to be had. But when it came to hearing an elderly woman screaming for help as she was brutally stabbed, the officers were suddenly faced with insurmountable obstacles that reduced them to yelling at a house from a safe distance away.
This is the worst kind of policing: officers who don’t feel it’s worth their effort, much less their time, to prevent or respond to a crime in (audible) progress. When confronted with their own laziness and (presumably) cowardice, the cops claimed they had zero chance of entering the house because the same metal gates they’d bypassed for other reasons were now the on-the-ground equivalence of… I don’t know… dealing with a foreign country with no extradition agreement in place.
This is already an absurd abdication of professionalism. But, thanks to the officers’ own report, it’s now in a realm of police failure that goes beyond what any talented satirist could actually create without destroying readers’ suspension of disbelief. “Challenged the apartment,” my ass. These officers need to be fired before they cause any more damage, either by hanging out near in-progress murders or by dragging down the entirety of the LVMPD to their level.
Filed Under: defund the police, las vegas pd, lawsuit, negligence, paula zuniga
Comments on “Lawsuit: Cops Stood By While Elderly Woman Was Stabbed 68 Times; Cops: Hey, We Yelled At The House”
Frustrated decent people” “The cops have no legal duty to protect you.”
Bootlickers: “The cops have no legal duty to protect you.”
We’re saying the same thing but with a significantly different moral equation.
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Hell, cops will mow down a house for which you have given them multiple keys, based on the belief a homeless guy went in there, or really nogood reason at all.
i’ll just guess that, on the aforementioned occasion, they just couldn’t think of another wrong way to handle the situation.
The cops stood silent outside the classrooms in Uvalde while kids were being massacred inside, so yelling at a closed door is a bit of an improvement for them.
Re:
You do have a point there.
Dear “the cops are always right” trolls:
Don’t.
Not for this story.
Just…don’t.
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Re:
Challenge accepted.
Frustrated decent people” “The cops have no legal duty to protect you.”
Bootlickers: “The cops have no legal duty to protect you.”
We’re saying the same thing but with a significantly different moral equation.
Mental gates stop most cops, I find.
Meanwhile 20 cops were surrounding a guy with a camera a few blocks down, and the black guy parking at his own house was swarmed by the swat team.
Not only will cops not help when your family member is raped, or murdered, they will be busy bullying some innocent person.
To all “good” cops.
Clean your shit up. Because if you don’t want the public to view your as a piece of shit, don’t stand silently by while other cops do this.
Re:
But those WERE the Good Cops. They weren’t out beating a “minority”.
Someone should’ve just told the cops that the elderly woman was being stabbed by a BLM protester, and they would’ve been arrested by the cops.
There. Problem solved.
Re:
No, then they would have just fired at anything in that house that moved.
Re: Re:
Not like that would have worked out worse, mind you.
Re:
Better solution would be to claim there was a drugs deal going on inside. Cops will bust right in with a reduced likelihood of them firing their weapons.
'There was nothing we could do(while staying outside in total safety).'
Cops to reporters and the public: If you defund us then the criminals will run wild, engaging in the most heinous actions imaginable without us to protect the public!
Cops when faced with an actual threat to themselves: Woah, hey now, we didn’t sign up for this job to put our safety at risk so we’ll just heroically stay way back here and wait for things to calm down enough that we can step in and heroically claim the credit as we explain that there was nothing we could do.
If the department wants to at least try to salvage their reputation and relationship with the public their first move should be publicly condemning the cowardice of the officers involved followed immediately by firing them for being so clearly unfit to wear the badge, yet I suspect it’ll be another case of a department closing ranks and issuing statements about how there was nothing they could do and it’s really unfair for the public to condemn the officers who stood back and yelled while a woman was stabbed dozens of times damn near right in front of them.
Was the weapon of stabbing a bayoneted AR15? Just curious.
Donuts
Someone should have told them that the guy robbed a donut shop on his way to the house.
I’d love to see the next case where the police try to argue exigent circumstances.
Re: exigent
somewhere exigence was left out of there vocabulary! or is it just used for non-crime home invasions! we got a call! when no one called! 911 hang up from a landline. no landline at the house! alarm call. no alarm hooked up!
Just move them somewhere else
Firing them will just force them to move over to the next county. Does not matter if they are straight up violating the people they swear to protect:
https://nowhabersham.com/former-commerce-police-officer-accused-of-arresting-innocent-drivers-hired-by-oglethorpe-county-sheriffs-office/
Q: What’s the difference between LVPD and UCPD?
A: Only one person was murdered while LVPD hung around ‘in fear for their lives’.