The mother of a slain 19-month-old girl, killed as her illegal father used her as a human shield while blasting away at Los Angeles police officers, continues her avaricious crusade against the LAPD. Lorena Lopez, the baby's mother, should clean up her own house first. Turns out baby Suzie Marie Pena had cocaine in her system when she was shot during a gun battle between her border-jumping Salvadoran father, Jose Raul Pena, and an LAPD SWAT team. The Lopez family looks worse and worse, even as it makes ever more inflammatory charges against the LAPD.

Jose Raul Pena had abducted his toddler daughter Suzie from Lorena Lopez’s home after physically threatening Lopez . Both Lopez and her 19-year-old daughter (by another man than Pena) called the police on a domestic violence charge. When the police found Pena at his auto dealership, he began shooting at them from behind the cover of his baby. After wounding an officer, Pena and his tiny human shield were both mortally shot.

The Lopez family immediately launched a crusade against the LAPD, blaming the officers for the daughter’s death and initiating a budget-busting law-suit against the beleaguered department. Hispanic and black anti-cop activists held daily protests against “police brutality.” Lopez’s attorney has just upped the ante by demanding a federal probe of the child’s death, claiming that the LAPD “is incapable of investigating its own officers”—an absurd claim undoubtedly intended to distract attention from the unraveling of the myth that Pena was a “good person” and the family a safe haven.

For it turns out that the real “brutality” against baby Pena even preceded her father’s decision to use her as a human sandbag. There was enough cocaine in circulation in the Lopez home to have found its way into the baby’s bloodstream in the days before the shooting. Add the cocaine poisoning to the multiple fathers that have contributed children to Lopez’s family, and you have a portrait of classic underclass dysfunction.

The Lopez-Pena saga demonstrates the growing reality of the fabled “Hispanic family values”—characterized by the highest rates of out-of-wedlock child bearing and high school drop-out behavior in the nation. To be sure, many immigrants lead exemplary lives of self-discipline, self-improvement, and economic striving. But while no one has been paying attention, a growing proportion of Hispanic immigrants—illegal and legal alike—are developing full-blown underclass habits, including uncontrolled gang violence, which are already costing the country dearly in welfare, social services, and prison expenses.