OAKLAND — Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price on Thursday announced criminal charges against three police officers involved in the 2021 death of Mario Gonzalez, who stopped breathing while being pinned to the ground by multiple officers.
Price said prosecutors from her office are charging three Alameda Police Department officers — Eric McKinley, James Fisher and Cameron Leahy — with involuntary manslaughter.
Her announcement, which comes almost three years to the day after Gonzalez’s death, marks a reversal from the conclusions of her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, who two years ago cleared the officers involved in Gonzalez’s death of any criminal wrongdoing. Her decision was closely watched, given how Gonzalez’s death drew comparisons to the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
“The officers’ decision to detain and arrest Mr. Gonzalez, and their subsequent use of force was objectively reasonable considering the agency policies, the totality of the circumstances and the officers’ stated rationale,” according to a 38-page critical incident team report made public in April 2022, while O’Malley was the district attorney.
Price on Thursday declined to say what — if any — new evidence had been brought in the case, emphasizing that she was “walled off” from the case. Rather, she said all of the work on the case was being handled by her Public Accountability Unit. The criminal complaint against the three officers was signed by Leah Abraham, a prosecutor who has helped lead some of the unit’s highest-profile cases.
Still, Price on Thursday touted the need to hold police officers to account when they are accused of breaking the law, stressing that “accountability is at the heart of the criminal justice system, not just a case like this.”
“If people don’t believe that police officers or law enforcement can be held accountable, then witnesses won’t cooperate,” said Price, adding that “we’re trying to rebuild trust in a system that has not always been fair to folks, particularly in Alameda County.”
“That’s a part of our mandate,” she said.
Price said none of the officers had been taken into custody at the time of her announcement, and their names had not appeared in the Santa Rita Jail log as of 6 p.m. Thursday.
Gonzalez died April 19, 2021, in an Alameda neighborhood near Scout Park after being contacted by officers, who suspected he had violated a municipal code banning open containers of alcohol in public. Officers tackled Gonzalez when he resisted being handcuffed, according to police video, and pinned him to the ground for several minutes as he screamed and whimpered before falling unconscious.
After Gonzalez’s death, police noted that a bottle of Canadian Mist whiskey in his possession had a security cap on it and opened a shoplifting investigation. The officers then travelled to at least five local stores on the day Gonzalez died in an attempt to find out whether Gonzalez stole four alcohol bottles that were found in his possession after the fatal struggle.
The Alameda County Coroner’s Office later ruled that Gonzalez’s death a homicide, citing the “stress of altercation and restraint” but also noting the “toxic effects of methamphetamine,” “morbid obesity” and “alcoholism” as contributing factors.
Fisher, Leahy and McKinely were later placed on paid administrative leave. Leahy and McKinely returned “into the workforce” in May 2022, an Alameda city spokesperson said last year. Fisher left the department in January 2023 “after finding employment with another agency,” the spokesperson added.
The city of Alameda’s administrative investigation didn’t find any sustained violations against the officers. Still, city leaders say they have taken several steps in the last couple of years to improve the department, including hiring a civilian police auditor.
The decision by Price’s office to file criminal charges drew immediate plaudits from the attorneys of Gonzalez’s children and relatives, who hailed it as necessary to ensuring that officers were held to the same standards as the people they’re entrusted with policing.
“A wrong has been righted,” said Adante Pointer, the attorney for Gonzalez’s mother. “These officers should have been charged originally. It’s just that the previous regime was very comfortable giving officer a pass when they didn’t deserve one.”
The charges were “good news” for Gonzalez’s police accountability, added Julia Sherwin, who helped represent Gonzalez’s son in a lawsuit that ended in an $11 million settlement. It was among the largest reached with a single child of someone killed by police in the state of California over the last decade. Gonzalez’s mother received another $350,000.
“It’s important when law enforcement officers so egregiously violate their training and the law that they be held accountable,” Sherwin said on Thursday evening. “I just hope that a criminal jury will do the right thing by Mario.”
Check back for updates to this developing story.
Source: www.mercurynews.com