The family of an unarmed 18-year-old fatally shot by an undercover Los Angeles police sergeant last month plans to sue the city for wrongful death and is asking state prosecutors to file criminal charges.
Ricardo “Ricky” Ramirez Jr. was shot and killed by Sgt. Michael Pounds around 10:30 p.m. July 13 while the plainclothes vice officer was conducting a prostitution enforcement detail along South L.A.’s Figueroa corridor. Pounds shot the young man from behind his car’s dark-tinted driver’s side window.
“Ricky, my only son, was a good kid, made everybody smile and feel loved. He was at the threshold of his whole life, having just graduated, and the LAPD shot him, causing him to fall through death’s door,” said the teen’s father, Ricardo Ramirez Sr. “Hiding behind tinted glass, without any warning, Ricky was killed. His only crime was being young and of color. This has to stop.”
The night of the shooting, an LAPD vice unit broadcast over the police radio that the “occupants of a silver Cadillac wearing ski masks [were] in a possible dispute with the driver of another vehicle,” according to a release from the department. Pounds was alone in an unmarked car when he began following the suspect vehicle, which police said later stopped across both lanes of traffic on 66th Street.
According to the police report, two men got out of the Cadillac and “approached the front driver and passenger sides of the vice sergeant’s vehicle” as it was stopped in the roadway. That is when Pounds opened fire through his window, striking Ramirez, who fell to the ground as the others fled.
Paramedics took Ramirez to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In a legal claim filed Wednesday, attorney Christopher Dolan alleged the shooting was an unprovoked attack on an unarmed young man who was in town from Northern California after graduation.
Although the claim alleges assault, battery and violation of civil rights and seeks compensation, Dolan said the family wants reforms, including video cameras in undercover vehicles to capture officers’ behavior.
“We want to make sure undercover cops are held accountable,” Dolan said.
The lawyer said that prior to the shooting, Pounds “tailgated and aggressively menaced” the Cadillac from his dark sedan with blacked-out window tinting.
“Unarmed, Ricky and another passenger exited the Cadillac and approached the sedan, asking — arms extended, palms up — why they were being followed,” Dolan said.
“Without hitting any lights or siren or identifying himself as a police or rolling down the window, a single shot was fired through the driver’s side tinted window directly into the heart of Ricky,” the lawyer said Wednesday at a news conference outside police headquarters while surrounded by two dozen supporters clad in T-shirts featuring the teen’s face.
After Ramirez was shot, the other young men fled “in fear for their lives, unaware that the shot was fired by an LAPD officer,” according to the claim.
LAPD units pursued the fleeing Cadillac, according to a release from the department, and eventually handed off to the California Highway Patrol, which stopped the vehicle on the 15 Freeway in San Bernardino County.
The three occupants of the car were taken into custody without incident, including the driver, 26-year-old Israel Dezama, who was arrested for felony evading, police said. The other two occupants were later released from custody.
Dezama has since been arrested and charged with murder in Contra Costa County in connection with a killing over the July 4th weekend, records show.
Ramirez’s parents say their son had come to L.A. to visit the beaches and had just been to the Santa Monica Pier. He didn’t really know the driver of the Cadillac, they said, only through a friend. His father pointed out that none of the men in the car that night have been arrested besides Dezama, who fled the scene.
Dolan said the shooting was “without justification and in violation of police policy designed to save lives. … The police must be held accountable in order for these killings to stop.”
He said Pounds never identified himself as a police officer.
“Ricky never knew that he was approaching an officer, never made any threats or contact with the vehicle and was shot for asking why the car was harassing them,” Dolan said.
Ramirez’s mother, Renee Villalobos, cried while addressing the crowd in front of police headquarters, saying, “I will never have my son back.”
“The police sergeant was sitting in an unmarked car, and he decided to kill and shoot my son for no reason at all,” she said. “I want to know why the police officer is not handcuffed and charged for the murder of my son.”
Ramirez’s father said that said despite police reports, his son “did not have a weapon; he didn’t have a ski mask.”
Los Angeles police said in a statement that no weapons were recovered.
Ramirez’s family and Dolan have called on Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office handles fatal police shootings on unarmed persons, to file murder charges against Pounds.
Police shootings are statistically rare; those involving officers in unmarked vehicles even more so.
According to a Times database of LAPD shootings, there have been at least 12 such shootings since 2017, resulting in four people being killed and eight being wounded.
The most recent incident occurred in January 2022, when two members of a drug unit shot and wounded a 28-year-old man in Boyle Heights while riding in an undercover car. The more senior member was showing the younger officer around the area when they spotted several men outside a known Tiny Boys gang hangout. After parking nearby to conduct surveillance, the officers saw one of the men take off running, and they opened fire after he appeared to point a gun at them.
The man, Adrian Aldaco, later sued the department, alleging he was unarmed and that the officers never identified themselves as police before firing. An internal report found that several of the officers’ shots were out of policy.
As in the Figueroa incident, there was no body camera footage of the shooting.
In June 2020, plainclothes officers from the Southwest Narcotics Enforcement Detail were driving an unmarked car while conducting “crime suppression” during the summer of protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They drove past a gas station near 22nd Street and Vermont when they saw an apparent carjacking in progress. The suspects shot at the officers, who returned fire, striking a man who was with the suspects but who wasn’t armed. One officer suffered a graze wound.
Another undercover operation in which the officer who fired wasn’t wearing a body camera occurred in 2019 in Sherman Oaks. A gang detective who was part of a surveillance detail shot and killed a man who was being sought on murder charges outside of his apartment.
At least five of the incidents involved members of the Metropolitan Division, which conducts crime-suppression operations and also occasionally is called on to track down violent fugitives.