OAKLAND — An undercover Oakland police officer on Wednesday described for the first time the chaotic events that led to the killing of his partner, Officer Tuan Le, testifying that the two come under fire while investigating a ransacked marijuana warehouse along the city’s waterfront.
Donald McKinney — a five-year veteran of the force and one of Le’s police academy classmates — described confusion at realizing their unmarked pickup was being riddled with bullets from some unseen gunman during a late December anti-burglary operation. One of those bullets struck Le in the head, leaving him mortally wounded as he sat in the driver’s seat next to McKinney.
The officer’s testimony came as the four suspects charged with murder in Le’s death appeared in court this week for a key evidentiary hearing that will determine whether enough evidence exists to send their cases to trial.
All four defendants — Mark Demetrious Sanders, Allen Starr Brown, Marquise Cooper and Sebron Russell — have pleaded not guilty. They also face a slew of other felonies and sentencing enhancements tied to the botched burglary, and remain held without bail at the Santa Rita Jail.
Authorities say Le was shot at about 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 29 while responding to the last of three burglaries that morning at a marijuana grow house on the 400 block of Embarcadero.
Speaking in a measured and methodical tone, McKinney said he and Le were part a larger, pre-dawn operation aimed at curtailing commercial burglaries across the city. They worked alongside two other sets of undercover officers in unmarked vehicles, as well as uniformed officers in three police cruisers and a supervising sergeant, he testified.
The officers responded to myriad burglary reports throughout Oakland that morning, including multiple alarms at the Embarcadero marijuana grow house, McKinney said.
They first visited the warehouse shortly after 1 a.m., when multiple burglars forced their way inside the building and triggered a security system that alerted the building’s owner of the break-in. That call ended with Le and McKinney following a Honda Civic for miles in their white, unmarked Nissan Frontier pickup truck and collecting the car’s license plate information.
The men hustled back to the warehouse a second time at around 4:30 a.m. that morning, when more burglars appeared to loot the warehouse.
That time, Le was in the driver’s seat when he pulled the truck into the warehouse’s parking lot. There, he watched as one of the burglars came out of the building and briefly pointed a gun at the officers’ truck, McKinney said.
When the gunman appeared to get into a nearby vehicle, Le pulled his pickup behind the car and followed it on Embarcadero. That’s when another undercover officer radioed McKinney to warn him that a black car had started tailing the officers.
Two unusual “thuds” followed, McKinney testified, prompting the men to look at each other in confusion before one of the truck’s windows shattered and bullets started peppering the truck.
The two tried ducking for cover while the truck traveled down Embarcadero, McKinney said. At one point, McKinney recalled seeing that Le had “seized up” after making an unusual noise, but “I didn’t really think anything of it too much.”
Moments later, their pickup plowed into a parked car. Trapped inside and unable to open his door, McKinney checked Le multiple times for injuries, but didn’t find any.
After being freed from the truck, Le was taken to Highland Hospital, where he died several hours later.
Prosecutors originally only charged three of defendants with murder, leaving Russell to just face three counts of second-degree commercial burglary, along with numerous sentencing enhancements. But that changed in February, just a day after Russell had signed paperwork pleading guilty to the lesser charges.
The hearing is expected to continue into next week.
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