On May 26, 2022, Officer Houston Tipping, an instructor for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Bicycle Patrol School, was in training with another cop when, the city of Los Angeles says, he “fell” and suffered a spinal cord injury that caused his death days later.
What city officials don’t mention in their account of Tipping’s death is that he was grappling with another LAPD Officer named David Cuellar, whom Tipping was investigating for sexual assault.
Cuellar, according to a civil suit filed by Tipping’s family, used the exercise as “cover” to attack and silence him, a charge the still active LAPD Officer, who is now assigned to the Media Relations unit, denies. According to lawyers representing Tipping’s family, Mark Geragos and Brad Gage, Cuellar was in the course waiting until Houston Tipping was in the mix for the fighting exercise.
“He waited and preyed upon him,” Gage told a jury Thursday during opening arguments in a civil suit, which names both the city of Los Angeles and the officer, that began this week in the Stanley Mosk courthouse with Judge Stephen P. Phaler presiding.
The sexual assault allegation, the suit alleges, came in 2021 when Tipping responded to a Los Angeles hospital where a woman claimed a cop attacked her. He reported the allegation to his superiors, and Cuellar was aware of that when he delivered what attorneys describe in the suit as an intentional “pile driver” that snapped Tipping’s spine, broke his spine, and led to his death three days...
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