Deputies Fired at a Dog in Palmdale. A Ricochet Killed 17-Year-Old Armando Garcia-Muro.

It was 3:45 in the morning on June 22, 2017, when Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrived at a Palmdale apartment complex. The call was a noise complaint. By the time the gunfire ended, a 60-to-65-pound pit bull was dead, and Armando Garcia-Muro, seventeen years old, had been struck and killed by a ricocheting sheriff's round.

Armando was not a bystander who wandered into the line of fire. He had tried to restrain the dog — attempting with his hands exactly what the deputies' gunfire was ostensibly for: control of the animal.

The deputies' account is that the pit bull charged and bit one deputy's knee. Two deputies then opened fire, discharging six to eight rounds at the dog. At least one round skipped and struck Armando, killing him. Another skip round hit a deputy in the knee.

Tally the casualties of a pre-dawn noise complaint: a dog shot dead; a seventeen-year-old killed by police gunfire after trying to help contain the animal; one deputy bitten, by the deputies' account; and a deputy struck in the knee by a skip round from the deputies' own fire. The deputies' rounds struck two human beings that morning — one of them fatally.

Six to eight rounds is a volume of fire, and it was directed at a dog in an apartment complex at 3:45 a.m., near a teenager who had tried to restrain the dog. What followed was not freak misfortune. It was the ordinary physics of that many bullets discharged where people live.

Three investigations were opened: by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, by the sheriff's Homicide Bureau, and by Internal Affairs — the Sheriff's Department examining a death its own deputies caused. That is where the public accounting in this record ends. It shows no reported discipline, no charges, no findings against the deputies who fired. Armando Garcia-Muro was seventeen, and he died trying to hold the dog back. A noise complaint became the police killing of a teenager, and the visible institutional response was the opening of files; what those files concluded, if anything, is not part of the reported record.