Emil Matasareanu, one of two armed robbers who raided a North Hollywood bank and then engaged police in a chilling televised shootout last year, slowly and unnecessarily bled to death because some of the officers involved made a series of mistakes and some of the firefighters violated their department's guidelines for dealing with such situations, a Times investigation has found.
Perhaps the most critical of these mistakes occurred when a Los Angeles Police Department officer erroneously told city Fire Department rescuers that he thought Matasareanu was dead, and emergency medical technicians accepted that assessment without examining the suspect. Later, when the rescuers discovered that Matasareanu, in fact, was still alive, the Fire Department's dispatchers never were informed, according to one of the commanders on the scene.
As a result, Matasareanu, handcuffed and moaning in pain, lay bleeding in the street for nearly 30 minutes after firefighters at the scene realized he was alive, because dispatchers still assumed he was dead. By the time an ambulance sent to his aid arrived, it was too late. Matasareanu had succumbed to injuries that could have been treated with standard emergency care.
"You should see how sad it looks when someone is dying in the street and nobody cares," said Dora Rubensky, an Archwood Street resident who watched the aftermath of the shootout from her frontyard.
Matasareanu and his accomplice, Larry Eugene Phillips Jr., were "bad guys," she said, but "not animals."
But Matasareanu's preventable death did more than raise unsettling moral questions. It also denied investigators their chance to recover $1.7 million taken in three other robberies in which Matasareanu and Phillips are thought to have been involved. Moreover, the dead man's children have sued the city, alleging that the police denied him medical attention.
Contrasting Accounts of What Happened
City authorities' version of these events contrasts sharply with The Times' reconstruction of the incident, which was pieced together from hours of taped police and Fire Department radio transmissions, video footage and photographs, the previously unavailable report of an LAPD investigation and interviews with eyewitnesses.
For example, police and Fire Department officials have said that rescuers in the first ambulance to reach the scene opted to take a wounded citizen to the hospital because his injuries were severe but treatable, while Matasareanu appeared to have little chance of survival.
