Officer May Have Lied About Shooting

When a school police officer claimed to have been shot on Jan. 19 detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department took it seriously. A few months later, however, they are now turning in the results of their investigation and it doesn't look good for the school officer.

Jeff Stenroos, an officer with the Los Angeles Unified School Police Department, originally said that he had been shot when confronting a man caught breaking into vehicles near El Camino Real High School. The response was a massive police manhunt that affected west San Fernando Valley for several hours. Hundreds of officers were sent out to search for the imaginary gunman and area schools and homes were locked down. The department, which was already struggling financially, was hit hard by the cost of overtime and extra men on the streets.

Yet detectives began to doubt Stenroos' story of a shooting despite signs that his bulletproof vest had absorbed a bullet and he had bruised ribs. Inconsistencies in his story began to emerge and soon Stenroos was avoiding follow-up interviews with the detectives. A week later Stenroos confessed to making up the story which led to his arrest for filing a false police report which is a felony offense.

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