That's a bald-faced LIE!
The federal government and LA County paid NOTHING. The TAXPAYERS (i.e. you, me , and the citizens of LA County) paid $5 million.
All the government agents (including police, sheriff, etc) involved in this horror should have been charged with murder and if convicted, executed.
Money is not a moral substitute for Justice!
Interesting. No posting guidelines broken, only one reply - but hidden in the back room while "death to druggies" threads are prominently displayed. Makes one wonder.....
A few gangland-style executions are a small price to pay to protect the alcohol industry from competition.
"warning that a drug offender had moved nearby"
Wrong! The warning was that a sex offender moved nearby. This is an important distinction because it explains the behavior (below) of this father of five young children, aged three to fifteen..
"The day of the shooting, Laverty was parked outside Aguilar's house, conducting surveillance of Arizona 86. Agents were looking for a green truck carrying a load of marijuana.
``There wasn't really any(thing) specific . . . to Three Points or . . . the block that I was on,'' he said. ``It wasn't imperative that I be right there.''
According to the Sheriff's Department investigation file: Aguilar and his two daughters noticed Laverty's unmarked sedan when they climbed into the family's van to go pick up Aguilar's wife at work. Aguilar stopped at a nearby Baptist church, turned around and drove back home. Aguilar ``thought that guy was gonna do something to us, so he went back home,'' Dominic Aguilar said.
Charde Aguilar said her father drove by slowly in order to get a good look at Laverty, who was ``laying down with his arms behind his head, with sunglasses on.'' When they returned, Aguilar told his daughters girls to go inside.
According to Dominic Aguilar's statement, his father was ``just gonna go scare the guy.'' The father ignored his son's pleas not to confront the unknown man. `That's the last (time) that I saw . . . my dad (alive, when) he went outside,'' Charde said.
The agent said Aguilar approached him as if stalking him. ``It wasn't a plain walk . . . it was kind of a stealthily . . . attack approach,'' he told investigators. Seconds later, Laverty said he saw Aguilar reach for an object inside his sweat pants.
``I turned around to . . . see who he was (and) next thing I saw was the barrel of a rifle trained directly on my head, inches away from the window,'' he said.
Aguilar was holding his .22-caliber sawed-off rifle, Dominic Aguilar said, with his right hand, while balancing it with his left forearm. Laverty said Aguilar ordered him to step out of the car.
But the agent refused ``trying to buy a little bit of time,'' he said. ``At that time I'm thinking of how to survive this incident and believing that at any moment (Aguilar) is going to fire that weapon and kill me,'' he said. ``So I'm trying to think of how to get out of this alive.''
Laverty said he yelled ``police'' at the Three Points resident. But when investigators asked the agent if he had identified himself as a DEA agent, he replied ``No, I believe that at any moment (Aguilar) was gonna pull the trigger and kill me. I saw that he had a weapon trained at my head.''
That day, he was wearing a badge around his neck but had it tucked into his shirt where it was not readily visible.
The DEA agent, who was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, said he drew his 9mm handgun, which was hidden between the front seats, put the car in reverse and fired eight shots at Aguilar through the windshield.
``The whole time that I was firing, my life was in danger and I believe he was shooting at me,'' said Laverty, a former Chicago Police Department officer. ``I never saw that the threat was neutralized,'' he said.
Dominic Aguilar saw it differently.
The stranger, he said, ``pulled back in his car (and) started shooting at my dad. My dad ran. My dad wasn't gonna shoot him.'' Trapped by a fence, Laverty had no choice but to stop his car and drive forward to flee. He did, and fired three more rounds at Aguilar.
``My dad ran,'' Dominic Aguilar said. But ``he shot him right here in the side.'' Bleeding from the abdomen, Aguilar staggered, stumbling several times before falling one last time on the dirt road near his home.
``I ran inside and told my sisters there was (a) shooting,'' Dominic Aguilar said. The teen then ran to a nearby video store and had a clerk call 911 before returning to his father's side.
``I went back, I got my baby brother's sweater and put it on my dad's ... stomach . . . where he'd been shot.''
Laverty told investigators he thought he heard a gunshot but could not be sure if David Aguilar opened fire at him. Dominic Aguilar also said he was unsure if his father had fired at the stranger.
A ballistics report showed that Aguilar's gun had been fired at least once, said Unklesbay. An empty cartridge was found in the chamber of Aguilar's weapon but investigators did not find a .22-caliber slug at the scene.
``All we can say for sure is that the casing that was found in the gun was fired by that gun,'' Unklesbay said. ``But we can't determine if it was actually (fired) that day.''
Eight years ago, Aguilar and his wife moved to Three Points from Tucson, neighbors said, to escape crime and gang violence. A few days prior to the fatal shooting, county deputies notified Three Points residents that a convicted sex offender was being released in their small community.
Attorneys for Aguilar's family said DEA officials failed to consider the heightened concern and increased level of suspicion homeowners in the remote community may have had as a result of the notification.
Aguilar's daughter Charde - who had read a flier taped in her school bus warning school children of the new resident - told detectives her father thought Laverty ``was the guy'' - the sex offender. She told detectives her father stayed home more often after being told of the sex offender.
But Laverty's lawyers say their client knew nothing of the notification when he parked in front of the family's brick home that Friday afternoon.
Most neighbors described David Aguilar as a family man who earned a living working construction jobs, coaching Little League and caring for his children while his wife worked at Sun Tran in Tucson.
Others knew him as a tempestuous man who had occasional run-ins with the law.
When he died, Aguilar had at least three outstanding citations, including one for shoplifting, and an outstanding warrant for his arrest."
-- pdxnorml.org