In mid-March 2013 the LAPD agreed to pay Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother Emma Hernandez, 71 — the LA Times delivery drivers whose truck had been shot up by LAPD officers during the February 2013 hunt for Christopher Dorner — $40,000 in lieu of the replacement truck the department had originally promised. The original framing FishbowlLA captured was the painful indignity of the negotiation: the LAPD had wanted them to pay taxes on a new truck, then settled for a check.
Then
The February 2013 LAPD operation hunting fugitive former officer Christopher Dorner had produced one of the most notorious police-shooting incidents in recent LA history. Carranza and Hernandez were delivering newspapers in Torrance in the early-morning hours of February 7, 2013, in a blue Toyota Tacoma. LAPD officers from the protective detail for one of the police-officer targets on Dorner’s threat list opened fire — putting more than 100 rounds into the truck, despite the fact that Dorner’s vehicle was a gray Nissan Titan and that the two women looked nothing like him. Carranza was wounded in the back; Hernandez was wounded in the back as well.
The LAPD had publicly committed to replacing the destroyed truck. When the time came to make good, the department initially required the women to pay the taxes on the new truck themselves — citing legal constraints on the department’s ability to provide a tax-free vehicle. The arrangement that emerged in the March 2013 settlement: $40,000 in cash, not a truck, so the women could buy a replacement vehicle themselves and handle the tax structure independently.
The original FBLA framing was angry but restrained — the underlying incident was severe, the settlement was administrative, and the broader question of LAPD accountability was still unresolved.
Now
The Carranza-Hernandez incident became one of the defining cases in subsequent LAPD use-of-force reform conversations. A separate civil settlement with the City of Los Angeles for the shooting itself was eventually announced — the women received $4.2 million from the city in early 2014 for the underlying constitutional violations and personal injuries. The settlement was one of the largest in LAPD history at the time and was widely cited in subsequent police-reform discussions.
The eight LAPD officers involved in the shooting were investigated. The department’s review found multiple violations of LAPD use-of-force policy. None of the officers were criminally charged. The internal-discipline outcomes varied — some officers were assigned to retraining; none were fired solely for the shooting.
Christopher Dorner died on February 12, 2013 — five days after the Carranza-Hernandez shooting — in a fire during a standoff with law enforcement in Big Bear. The Dorner case itself produced significant subsequent reporting and the eventual Netflix documentary Manhunt: Deadly Games and other dramatizations of the manhunt.
Margie Carranza and Emma Hernandez have remained in the public eye intermittently in subsequent years, including occasional interviews on anniversaries of the incident. The broader question of LAPD-officer use of force in mistaken-identity situations has continued to be a recurring matter for the city, with subsequent incidents under the Charlie Beck and Michel Moore chief tenures and into the Jim McDonnell era. The 2013 settlement is now a documented case in academic policing-and-civil-liability literature.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2013 snapshot