RELATIVES ASSAIL FATAL SHOOTING OF `LOTTO TICKET BANDIT'.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

Fred Sammons' family said Monday that the clerks at his neighborhood 7-Eleven knew him so well that he never would have risked robbing the store once, let alone five times as police insist.

They also insisted the baby-faced 20-year-old unemployed security guard was unarmed, even though police say he was robbing the store and threatened them with a gun before they fatally shot him Sunday.

``It's a big mistake,'' said Sammons' aunt, Sheila Spates. ``To me it's a nightmare. I've lived with this child. He wouldn't do anything like this.''

As relatives gathered to grieve Monday in the store parking lot at 7018 Van Nuys Blvd., police released a store surveillance tape they say shows he was armed.

``For a 7-Eleven tape, it's very clear,'' said Los Angeles police Lt. Anthony Alba. ``You can see the glint of a shiny object which is, in fact, the chrome-plated handgun.''

That day, detectives had staked out the store because it had been robbed four times since May 12 - by the same person, Alba said. Past surveillance tapes show Sammons committing the other heists, which earned him the nickname ``lotto ticket bandit'' because he took lottery tickets as well as cash, Alba said.

This time, when Sammons dragged the clerk across the store at gunpoint about 12:35 a.m., Los Angeles police Officer Keith Hunter came out of the back room and shot Sammons in defense of his own life and that of the clerk, Alba said.

Though wounded, Sammons then ran out of the store and was confronted by two other officers who ordered him to drop the gun. When he didn't, Officers Chris McKinney and Don Schmidt fired and killed him, Alba said.

Alba said it appears the shooting was justified, but all officer-involved shootings are investigated by detectives and reviewed by the chief.

At the time he was shot, Sammons was on probation for petty theft, Alba said.

The grainy black-and-white surveillance images that Alba held up as proof did little to placate relatives, who variously decried the shooting as the result of mistaken identity or overkill.

``They set him up because they thought he was the bandit,'' said Renee Jones, a cousin of Sammons. ``Now they're trying to cover their tracks.''

The relatives believe Sammons was unarmed because a neighbor said he saw no evidence of a gun as Sammons lay bleeding in the parking lot about two minutes after the shooting.

But Alba said the officers took the gun out of Sammons' right hand immediately after the shooting. ``Any time we shoot someone, whether we think they're dead or not, the first thing we do is kick (the gun) away or use a nightstick to push it away,'' Alba said.

Of those who knew Sammons, only his girlfriend, Carla Saturno, was willing to concede he could have committed the armed robbery, but questioned whether the hail of police gunfire was warranted.

``Let's say he had a gun,'' said Saturno, 22, who is eight months pregnant with Sammons' son. ``Did they really let him know they would shoot if he didn't put the gun down? Did they really do everything possible before killing him?''

Saturno, through tears, said police should have shot to disarm Sammons.

But Alba said police shoot to stop, not to kill.

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Photo

Photo: A security photo shows the holdup in the Panorama City 7-Eleven.