At about 5:45 p.m. on June 30, 2013, Hawthorne police were working a barricade situation at 137th Street and Jefferson Avenue. Leon Cordell Rosby, then 53, came down the block with Max, his 2-year-old Rottweiler, on a long leash-line, holding up his cellphone to record the officers. He was not the only one filming: NBC Los Angeles reported that another man stood a few feet away recording the same scene and was not approached by police.
Police said Rosby was interfering with the standoff. "This interference included loud, distracting music (from the individual's vehicle), and his intentional walking within close proximity to armed officers, while holding an 80-pound Rottweiler on a long leash-line," the Hawthorne Police Department said in a statement after the incident. Police said he had pulled up to the scene and begun taking pictures, and that officers decided to arrest him.
Max was in the car when the officers put Rosby in handcuffs. The dog began barking out of an open window, then jumped out and barked at the officers. One officer reached toward Max several times, apparently trying to grab the leash. The dog lunged at him and he fired four shots. Max went down in the street, yelping and struggling. Rosby, still cuffed, cried out and his legs buckled. On the bystander video, onlookers can be heard wailing and screaming.
"I never meant my dog to be killed and shot like that," Rosby said days later. "He wasn't just shot. He was executed."
The footage was viewed millions of times within days of being posted — nearly three million by early 2014 — and generated protests and media attention across the country. Hawthorne police said afterward that angry calls, emails and tweets were pouring in, along with some threats.
What followed the video was not an accounting of the shooting but a prosecution of the man who was filming. After the department released a second video of the incident, shot by a witness, Rosby was alleged to have confronted that witness at her home. In August 2013 the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged him with six felony counts, including dissuading a witness from prosecuting a crime, witness intimidation and making criminal threats. He pleaded not guilty and was awaiting a preliminary hearing when the civil case was filed.
The accountability record
On Feb. 13, 2014, Rosby filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the city of Hawthorne and three of its officers — Christopher Hoffman, Michael Matson and Jeffrey Salmon — alleging violation of civil rights, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit says Hoffman fired the shots that killed Max, and alleges the shooting was "intended to humiliate and harm" Rosby by forcing him to watch. It further alleges that Hawthorne police retaliated for the video by fabricating reports casting Rosby as the aggressor, and that he had been targeted since filing a 2011 complaint accusing the department of corrupt practices. Those are allegations in a complaint, unproven and untested; Rosby asked for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
Neither account reports any discipline, any finding by the department, or any policy change in the wake of a shooting watched by millions of people. No criminal charge against any officer appears in either account. The record of what Hawthorne concluded about the four shots its officer fired is, in the sources reviewed, blank.