The death of a young officer following a training exercise was accidental, and investigators found no evidence negligence or wrongdoing led to the officer’s catastrophic injury, the Los Angeles Police Department said Tuesday.
Officer Houston Tipping died a week after he and another trainee officer fell to the floor during a scenario in a police academy classroom May 26. He’d suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury. He was 32 years old and had been on the LAPD for about five years.
“In falling, the two of them, to the ground, that’s where the injury occurred,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore explained during a meeting of the LA Board of Police Commissioners Tuesday.
Moore, providing more detail than before on the incident, said Tipping was role-playing as an aggressor confronting another officer who was a student in the class, when Tipping used his head and shoulder to push the student officer, who then wrapped his arm around the back of Tipping’s neck.
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“The impact on the ground, with the arm of the (other) officer in that position, on the back side of Officer Tipping’s neck, and the resulting – in that instance, is where the fracture occurred,” he said.
Moore said it happened in an instant, and promised to make public on Tuesday the Department’s internal report.
Tipping’s mother has filed a legal claim against the City alleging it was a wrongful death, and her attorney said this week that Tipping had been investigating a sexual misconduct allegation against one of the student officers in the training class when it happened.
The attorney, Brad Gage, said during a news conference in June that Tipping’s injuries did not match the LAPD’s then-official account of the incident. Gage said there was a laceration to Tipping’s head that might be evidence of a physical fight beyond the fall to the floor.
The LAPD declined to respond to the attorney’s allegations, citing potential litigation, but the head of the Tipping death investigation, LAPD Constitutional Police director Lizabeth Rhodes, told the Police Commission she had wide authority to investigate the case, and found no evidence of misconduct.
“I do realize that there is, there are, a number of allegations, for which we have not seen any evidence out there,” she told Commissioners.
The LA County Coroner’s Office determined Tipping’s death was caused by a spinal cord injury sustained, “during a law enforcement training exercise.” The autopsy report classified the death as an accident.
The Coroner’s report noted the laceration to Tipping’s left scalp was the result of medical intervention, detailed as a, “Mayfield C-clamp,” that was placed on Tipping’s head during spinal surgery, and also noted rib fractures were the result of CPR efforts.
