Funeral Held for Hawthorne Officer Killed in Crash

Hawthorne police Sgt. Leonard Luna, who was killed earlier this week in a motorcycle crash on the 105 Freeway, was honored at a funeral at St. James Church in Redondo Beach on Friday afternoon.

The pews were full of police officers and civilians who came to pay their respects.

At the conclusion of the service, the funeral procession traveled up Pacific Coast Highway to Palos Verdes Boulevard and Palos Verdes Drive North. Luna will be buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes.

The sergeant was killed Monday in an on-duty traffic crash. He was on his personal motorcycle on his way to Long Beach when the crash occurred. According to the California Highway Patrol, he was in the carpool lane when his Harley-Davidson collided with the rear right of a Toyota with seven people inside.

He was thrown to the pavement and died at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. No one in the Toyota was hurt, the CHP reported.

Luna, who grew up in the South Bay and graduated from high school in Torrance, was a 10-year veteran of the Hawthorne Police Department, achieving the rank of detective in 2006 and sergeant in 2010.

He was appointed in January as the department's Traffic Bureau commander and finished at the top of his class when he took a police motorcycle training course following his appointment, said Hawthorne police public information officer Lt. Scott Swain. He is survived by his parents and a brother, Swain said.

Swain said members of the department, which has been drawing intense criticism since an officer killed a Rottweiler in a videotaped shooting on June 30, were taking Luna's death hard.

"They're visibly shaken," Swain told reporters. "We just went through this two years ago with Officer Andrew Garton," who was also killed while riding a motorcycle.

"It almost feels like we were just getting back some normalcy from that and then this happened," he said.

In May 2011, Garton, 44, who had been on the force for 7 1/2 years, was killed in a collision with an El Segundo motorcycle officer on Hawthorne Boulevard while escorting a funeral procession for a Manhattan Beach police officer who had died of cancer.

Hawthorne Police Chief Robert Fager said at the time that Garton was the first officer killed in the line of duty in the department's 89-year history.

—City News Service contributed to this report.