Police Murders

Mexican authorities have detained five people in connection with last week's fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, but U.S. investigators have not said whether they are suspects in the case. The detainees were arrested within two days after Robert Rosas, a three-year agency employee, was shot multiple times by suspected smugglers near the border fence.

Three Mexican police officers were abducted, killed and dumped on a heavily patrolled road not far from the U.S. border on New Year's Day despite an influx of troops in the area, the state attorney general's office said Thursday. The bodies of the officers from this sprawling border city near San Diego were found wrapped in sheets outside the nearby beach town of Rosarito on a highway with several army checkpoints.

In the 26 years since former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal gunned down her cop husband on a Philadelphia street, Maureen Faulkner has often felt like a reed in a tornado. As death penalty opponents around the world rallied to win Abu-Jamal a new trial, contending that he had been framed by local police, Faulkner quietly fought back one hearing at a time. She never missed a court hearing through the long appeals process, even after she moved from Philadelphia to suburban Ventura County.

Heavily armed men killed three senior police officers and six other people here hours after a foiled armored car robbery, the latest attacks apparently triggered by a crackdown on police corruption and organized crime. Since Dec. 1, when Mayor Jorge Ramos took office promising to battle drug cartels, five officers, including three deputy chiefs, have been fatally shot gangland-style.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent pursuing suspected drug smugglers along the California-Mexico border was struck and killed Saturday by one of the fleeing vehicles, agency officials said. The agent was trying to stop two vehicles that had illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico when he was hit, said agent Jeremy Schappell, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Yuma sector. He said the incident occurred about 9:30 a.m.

The standoff began shortly after a man in Winnetka called 911 saying he had gunned down three relatives. It ended early Thursday -- more than eight hours later -- with a single round from a police sniper who killed the suspect as he emerged from his burning house firing a barrage of bullets. In between, two highly decorated Los Angeles Police Department officers were shot, one fatally. The LAPD was deeply shaken by the nightlong siege in an otherwise quiet San Fernando Valley neighborhood.

Edwin Rivera spent many a day hanging around his family's Welby Way home in the San Fernando Valley watching TV, playing video games and shooting the breeze with friends who came by to shoot baskets and drink beer on the back patio. He was the son of immigrants; he got into fistfights, had a hard time in school and later had trouble holding a job, according to those who knew him.

To many children who have so little, Officer Randy meant so much. He brought them bicycles at Christmas. He took them to Dodgers games and McDonald's. He got them new shoes for school. He invited them to day camp for a swim and slipped their parents money for groceries. Nearly every weekend he visited lower income neighborhoods from Carson to Watts to South-Central, as part of a church group he founded -- Glory Kids Ministries -- to steer youngsters from gangs and toward the gospels.

Funeral services were held Friday for Officer Randal Simmons, 51, of the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT team, who was fatally shot Feb. 7 during a standoff at a Winnetka house, where a gunman killed three family members. A police sniper killed the gunman. The Times' Homicide Report blog and message boards have received more than 600 comments from readers expressing their feelings about Simmons' death.

A Colombian army colonel and 14 soldiers were convicted Monday of killing members of an elite, U.S.-trained counter- narcotics police squad on the orders of drug traffickers, one of the most sordid of several recent cases of alleged corruption in the armed forces. A judge in Cali found Col. Bayron Carvajal and the soldiers guilty of aggravated homicide in the slaughter of 10 police officers and an informant in a May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near Cali.