2nd Ventura Officer Testifies in Shooting of Girl, 14

A Ventura police officer testified Thursday that a 14-year-old girl was holding a knife and flailing her arms as she ran down stairs just before a second officer shot the girl at her foster home in May.

“She became very upset and started yelling and screaming and kind of brushing and swinging her arms,” Officer Greg Knupp said. “As [the knife] moved, I could see the shine of the blade.”

The girl is on trial on suspicion of felony assault of an officer.

But Knupp said the girl was holding the knife at her side during the seconds he watched her, and that he never saw her raise it. When he first saw her, Knupp testified, she was pointing the knife’s blade backward.

Knupp’s account differs from that of Officer Kristen Rupp, who last week testified she had no choice but to shoot when the girl raised the knife and rushed her.

Knupp said his view of the girl was at times obstructed by other officers, but he remembered hearing Rupp repeatedly telling the girl to put down the knife.

Rupp has testified she ordered the girl to drop the knife, but that the girl became enraged and rushed her with the knife. Rupp backed into the kitchen and shot the girl three times. Two bullets hit the girl in the abdomen.

Rupp has been cleared of wrongdoing by a departmental investigation. The girl, a recent Chinese immigrant, has been charged with assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.

In other testimony Thursday, the girl’s father, Wei Guo of Newbury Park, described his daughter’s troubled past.

She was born in China and her mother wanted nothing to do with her after the couple separated, he said. The girl has not seen her mother since she was about 3 years old, he said.

Guo said the girl spent her early years shuttling between a boarding school and her grandmother’s house in China. In 1998 she joined Guo, a restaurant owner in the United States, but he said the adjustment was tough.

“She faced many difficulties,” Guo said through a court interpreter. “The main thing I told her was that everyone has to go through this phase.”

Guo described how a county protective agency removed the girl from his custody after he beat her with a belt three years ago. She was sent to China, but was back with her father within months. The county again removed the girl after she complained about her father’s strictness to a social worker, Guo said.

The case is being monitored closely by members of the Southland’s Chinese American community. It has called for the girl’s release.

The girl’s attorneys have filed a civil claim against the city of Ventura and the county, saying the shooting was unjustified and accusing the county of failing to train the girl’s foster family and not providing adequate treatment for her injuries.

“She’s been treated pretty harshly by the system,” said Munson Kwok, a vice president of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance in Los Angeles. “We will be looking for an acquittal.”