The family of an unarmed 18-year-old man shot and killed last month by an undercover Los Angeles police sergeant 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. on July 13, while the plainclothes police officer was conducting a prostitution enforcement operation in South Los Angeles’ Figueroa Corridor. Pounds shot the young man from behind the dark-tinted driver’s side window of his car.
“Ricky, my only son, was a good kid, he made everyone smile and he felt loved. He was at the threshold of his life, fresh out of college, and the LAPD shot him, sending him into death’s door,” said the teen’s father, Ricardo Ramirez Sr. “Ricky was killed hiding behind tinted windows, without any warning. His only crime was being young and black. This has to stop.”
The night of the shooting, an LAPD vice unit reported over 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 statement from the department. Pounds was alone in an unmarked car when he began following the suspect vehicle, which police said later stopped in both lanes of traffic on 66th Street.
According to the police report, two men exited the Cadillac and “approached the front driver and passenger sides of the vice sergeant’s vehicle” as it sat stopped on the road. That’s 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 lawsuit 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 his graduation.
While the lawsuit 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 officers are held accountable,” Dolan said.
The attorney said that before the shooting, Pounds “was walking very close and aggressively threatening” the Cadillac from his dark sedan with tinted windows.
“Unarmed, Ricky and another passenger exited the Cadillac and approached the sedan, asking, with their arms outstretched and palms up, why they were being followed,” Dolan said.
“Without turning on any lights or sirens or identifying himself as a police officer or rolling down his window, a single shot was fired through the tinted driver's side window directly into Ricky's heart,” the attorney said Wednesday at a news conference outside police headquarters while surrounded by two dozen supporters wearing T-shirts bearing the teenager's face.
After Ramirez was shot, the other youths fled “in fear for their lives, unaware that the shot was fired by an LAPD officer,” according to the complaint.
LAPD units pursued the fleeing Cadillac, according to a department statement, and eventually turned it over to the California Highway Patrol, who stopped the vehicle on the 15 Freeway in San Bernardino County.
The three occupants of the vehicle were taken into custody without incident, including the driver, Israel Dezama, 26, who was arrested for felony evasion, police said. The other two occupants were later released.
Dezama has since been arrested and charged with murder in Contra Costa County in connection with a killing that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend, records show.
Ramirez's parents say their son had come to Los Angeles to visit the beaches and had just been at the Santa Monica Pier. He didn't actually know the Cadillac's driver, they said, only through a friend. His father said none of the men in the car that night have been arrested, except for Dezama, who fled the scene.
Dolan said the shooting was “unjustified and in violation of police policy designed to save lives. … Police must be held accountable so these killings will stop.”
He said Pounds never identified himself as a police officer.
“Ricky never knew 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 as she addressed the crowd outside police headquarters, saying, “I'll never get my son back.”
“The police sergeant was sitting in an unmarked car and decided to kill and shoot my son for no reason,” she said. “I want to know why the police officer was not handcuffed and charged with the murder of my son.”
Ramirez's father said that despite police reports, his son “did not have a gun; he did not have a ski mask.”
Los Angeles police said in a statement that no weapons were recovered.
Ramirez and Dolan's family have asked Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office handles fatal police shootings of unarmed people, to file murder charges against Pounds.
Police shootings are statistically rare; those involving officers in unmarked vehicles even rarer.
According to a Times database of Los Angeles Police Department shootings, there have been at least 12 such shootings since 2017, resulting in four people killed and eight injured.
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 senior member was showing the younger officer around the area when they saw several men outside a known Tiny Boys gang hangout. After parking nearby to conduct surveillance, the officers saw one of the men run away and opened fire after he appeared to point a gun at them.
The man, Adrian Aldaco, later sued the department, alleging that 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 not in compliance with policy.
As in the Figueroa incident, there was no body camera footage of the shooting.
In June 2020, plainclothes officers from the Southwest Narcotics Unit were driving an unmarked car while conducting “crime suppression operations” during the summer of protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They drove past a gas station near 22nd and Vermont when they saw an apparent carjacking in progress. The suspects fired at the officers, who returned fire, wounding a man who was with the suspects but was not armed. One officer suffered a graze wound.
In 2019, in Sherman Oaks, another undercover operation occurred where the officer who fired the shot was not wearing a body camera. A gang detective who was part of a surveillance team shot and killed a man who was being sought on murder charges outside his apartment.
At least five of the incidents involved members of the Metropolitan Division, which conducts crime suppression operations and is also occasionally called upon to track down violent fugitives.
