Los Angeles police on Friday identified the man they say fired at officers at the end of a Thursday-night pursuit through Koreatown as Dominic Cosio, 31. Cosio was shot in the exchange of gunfire at the intersection of First Street and Berendo Street, dropped his firearm and was taken to hospital, where police said he showed stable vital signs. As of Friday he was in the custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department medical jail ward. Nothing in the police account has been tested in court, and no charges had been announced in the reports published by Friday.
Source: MyNewsLA / LAPD statement
The incident began at 8:57 p.m. on Thursday, when officers responded to a call about an armed male suspect near the intersection of Third Street and Rampart Boulevard, on the Westlake side of the Rampart Division, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Responding officers initially stopped the suspect for multiple vehicle code violations — but before they approached the vehicle, police said, the suspect attempted to arm himself, and the officers requested backup.
Officers made several attempts to get the man to come out of his vehicle, police said, but he refused and fled, and a vehicle pursuit ensued. ABC7's AIR7 helicopter, which filmed the scene afterwards, described a slow-speed chase that began in the Westlake area and ended in Koreatown. During the pursuit, officers deployed a tyre deflation device, which disabled the vehicle — a Ram pickup — at the intersection of First and Berendo streets.
"Upon stopping his vehicle, the suspect exited through the driver's door, produced a handgun and fired at the officers, resulting in an officer-involved shooting," the department said in its statement, quoted by MyNewsLA. Police say Cosio was hit in the return fire, dropped the firearm and was taken into custody at the scene before being transported to hospital.
Aerial footage from AIR7 showed the parked vehicle with its windows blown out by gunfire and an officer shining a flashlight on a handgun lying in the street. KTLA and KCAL also carried reports of the pursuit suspect being hospitalised after the shootout, and an early ABC7 report said no officers had been injured by gunfire.
One officer at the scene was taken to hospital for a foot injury sustained during the pursuit, police said. No other officers and no civilians were injured in the exchange of gunfire — a point that matters in Koreatown, one of the densest neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, where the pursuit ended on a residential street lined with apartment buildings.
A 'ghost gun' at the centre of the case
The firearm recovered at the scene was believed to be a Polymer 80 ghost gun, police said, and investigators determined on recovery that it contained five live rounds in the magazine; it was taken in as evidence. Ghost guns are firearms assembled from kits or parts that carry no serial number, which makes them effectively untraceable in a criminal investigation. California law requires homemade and privately made firearms to be serialised and registered, and unserialised guns sit at the centre of a running fight between the state and federal regulators — context that is likely to shape whatever charges prosecutors file in this case.
Cosio's identification came a day after the same neighbourhood saw a separate, unrelated enforcement story: masked federal agents detained one person on a Koreatown street on Friday morning in the ongoing ICE surge across Los Angeles County. The two incidents are not connected — one is a city police pursuit, the other a federal immigration operation — but together they made Friday an unusually heavy day of sirens in the district.
The other Koreatown story from Friday — the morning ICE detention on St. Andrews Place — is here: Read: masked agents detain one person in Koreatown
What happens next
As of the reports published on Friday, police had not announced the charges Cosio will face, and the department had not released the names of the officers involved. He remains in the Sheriff's Department medical jail ward while he recovers, which means any first court appearance will wait on his medical condition. Officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles are investigated by the department and reviewed independently before any decision on the officers' actions, and prosecutors will separately decide what the man in the Ram is charged with. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when charges are filed.
Pursuits that end in gunfire are a recurring flashpoint in Los Angeles policing, and the recovered weapon — an unserialised ghost gun with live rounds still in it — is exactly the kind of firearm California's serialization laws were written to eliminate. For Punjabi and other immigrant families across Los Angeles County, two unconnected enforcement actions in one neighbourhood in one day is also a reminder of how quickly an ordinary evening can turn into a police story.