Ex-LAPD officer convicted of off-duty murder in Pomona sentenced to 40 years to life

A former rookie Los Angeles police officer who gunned down a man while off duty outside a Pomona bar and then fled to Mexico was sentenced Wednesday to 40 years to life in prison.

Henry Solis, 32, was convicted Feb. 5 of second-degree murder for the March 13, 2015, shooting of 23-year-old Salome Rodriguez Jr. The seven-man, five-woman jury also found that Solis had personally discharged a handgun during the commission of the crime.

Solis was arrested by Mexican authorities in the border city of Juarez and deported to the United States about 2½ months after Rodriguez’s killing.

Rodriguez’s mother, Lidia Rodriguez, told reporters outside court after Solis’ conviction that the verdict “should have been first-degree [murder], but I’m good with second-degree.”

Solis’ attorney, Bradley Brunon, said he was “disappointed” by the outcome. He had asked jurors to acquit his client, a former Marine who he said had “never been in trouble a day in his life.”

“Henry Solis is a good person. He spent years serving the country honorably [and] would have made a terrific peace officer,” Brunon said. “Unfortunately, this event occurred and derailed his plans. ... We felt that the evidence didn’t warrant a murder conviction — perhaps manslaughter on a theory of provocation or imperfect self-defense. [The] jury didn’t agree.

“Forty to life is a big jolt for anybody, particularly somebody who’s never had a misdeed in his life,” the defense attorney told reporters at the time.

In her closing argument, Deputy Dist. Atty. Deann Rivard told the jury that Solis “wasn’t acting like a cop” at the time of the shooting and called into question Solis’ claim that he was trying to arrest Rodriguez after being robbed and sexually assaulted by two men inside the restroom of the bar.

The prosecutor noted that video surveillance cameras along the street captured much of the interaction between Solis and Rodriguez, but not the shooting itself, and urged jurors to ask themselves if Solis’ actions looked like what a police officer would do.

“Nobody in this courtroom ... wants to believe that a police officer sworn to uphold the laws ... would kill somebody for a stupid reason, for some reason, a slight, whatever it is,” Rivard told the panel, adding that it was the only reasonable conclusion about what had happened.

Another prosecutor, Martha Carrillo, told the jury that she suspected “somebody disrespected” Solis and he “zeroed in on the wrong guy” while trying to exact revenge.

She said he subsequently told a roommate that he “killed somebody,” and later conceded that “the evidence caught up to him.”

In his closing argument, Solis’ attorney said he was convinced that his client wouldn’t have been prosecuted if he had stayed at the scene of the shooting. Brunon said the rookie officer “panicked” and “ran away” in what was the “biggest mistake he’s ever made in his life,” but said it didn’t prove that he should be found guilty of murder.

“It’s not easy to say that a person who kills someone is not guilty,” Brunon said. “But if it’s done in an effort to arrest ... by a peace officer, if it’s done in self-defense, it’s not a crime. He is not guilty, and that’s your duty — to find him not guilty.”

Solis, who worked at the LAPD’s Devonshire Division in the San Fernando Valley, was fired soon after becoming the subject of an extensive weeks-long manhunt that ended with his arrest in Mexico. He had been on the force for about four months at the time of the shooting.

His father drove him out of California after the shooting and later told federal authorities that he had dropped his son off at a Texas bus stop, but the pair were caught on surveillance video walking across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Solis had been staying with relatives in the Juarez area prior to his arrest, FBI officials said.

His father, Victor, was convicted by a federal jury in El Paso of lying to the FBI about helping his son’s escape. He was sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $1,000.