Veteran LAPD officer sues to get job back after recorded comments derail career - Washington Post
On March 18, 1997, Los Angeles Police Detective Frank Lyga thought the hard part of his day was over. Then, stopped in his 1991 Buick Regal at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Lankershim Boulevard, he was accosted by a black man in a green Jeep. The problem: The man he killed, Kevin Gaines, was an LAPD officer. The bizarre scenario — an apparent case of officer-on-officer road rage — would set off the investigation of a corrupt anti-gang unit that resulted in perhaps the scandal-ridden LAPD’s lowest moment. And now, Lyga wants his day in court. The former detective, terminated from the LAPD just last year after making racially charged remarks in a discussion of Gaines’s death, is suing the city of Los Angeles for racial discrimination. “The decision to terminate Plaintiff Frank Lyga was based not on evidence that he was a racist police officer, but on the perception by others that he is a racist police officer and the fact that if he is not terminated, it would give fodder to... Lyga’s suit, filed last week in U. S. District Court, is just the latest twist in the tangled tale of the Rampart scandal that rattled the LAPD to its core two decades ago. After Lyga shot Gaines, the ensuing investigation revealed that Gaines, who had previously brandished his weapon behind the wheel, was connected to Suge. Source: www.washingtonpost.com
