A man was shot and killed outside a mall in Culver City Friday night — only days after Attorney General Pam Bondi caught flak for calling out crime in the trendy neighborhood in a heated exchange with a Los Angeles lawmaker.
Shots rang out just before 7:30 p.m. Friday at the popular Westfield Culver City mall, police said, with the unidentified victim found mortally wounded near the entrance to Macy’s. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Police were still searching for two suspects as of Saturday morning.
The deadly incident comes two days after Bondi put Culver City in the spotlight while sparring with California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dov at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.
Kamlager-Dov had called out the nation’s top law enforcement official at the Jeffrey Epstein-focused hearing, saying there are “violent, dangerous people out here with real threats, and the dishonesty from your agency comes from the covering up of these threats that could hurt American people and put our lives at risk.”
“Her district includes Culver City, and she’s not talking about any crime in her district, nothing about helping crime in her district,” Bondi shot back. “She’s not even worth getting into the details.”
Culver City officials appeared puzzled by the remarks — Kamlager-Dov noting that Culver City is “known for parks, studio lots, and breakfast burritos—not crime.”
Mayor Freddy Puza told the Los Angeles Times that Bondi’s slam appeared to be a “knee-jerk reaction.”
“My read of it is that she’s trying to deflect,” he said. “I think she could really spend her time prosecuting the people in the Epstein files and making sure that information from the federal government is transparent.”
