San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
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More than two years ago, a Danville officer shot and killed a mentally ill man who tried to evade police. Will there be consequences?
The 911 caller was polite but insistent. He’d pulled up to his home in suburban Danville to find his neighbors worrying aloud about the stranger who had appeared at his doorstep and then lingered, wearing black pants, a gray sweatshirt and a blank expression. The visitor was “lurking around our property” on Cottage Place, the caller told a dispatcher. Something wasn’t right. At 5 feet 5, the visitor — later identified as 33yearold Laudemer Arboleda — was slight, with boyish features. He had driven into Danville about 10 a.m. that Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018, parking his silver Honda Civic near the culdesac of brown, cabinlike bungalows. Arboleda had a purpose, but perhaps one that only he understood. He hoped to find the property manager of the condominium he shared
with his mother, Jeannie Atienza, in Newark, about 30 miles south of Danville. The relationship between mother and son had strained as they struggled through a transition in Arboleda’s life. He was showing signs of severe paranoia and delusions, while also trying to assert his independence.
In the preceding weeks, Arboleda had told his mother and sister that he wanted to move out. He thought the property manager could help. Yet he apparently had the wrong address and failed to convey his intentions to residents who found him ringing doorbells and then wandering for 45 minutes. He was carrying what looked like fastfood bags, one woman later told detectives, adding that Arboleda smelled as if “he hadn’t bathed in a week.”
When neighbors asked whether they could assist him, Arboleda seemed defensive, declared that he knew where he was going, and ducked behind a tree to avoid one man’s inquiries. Finally, he headed back to the Honda, which he’d stuffed with possessions: an American Red Cross backpack, notebooks bursting with indecipherable messages, $2,690 neatly divided into envelopes.
He was “a strange individual,” the 911 caller said. “Standing around the door. Refused to leave.”
Within an hour, Arboleda would be dead.
The Chronicle obtained more than a dozen videos and hundreds of pages of documents to reconstruct what happened in those critical minutes. When a Danville officer shot and killed Arboleda — a moment captured on video from two angles — he abruptly ended a meandering, lowspeed, sevenminute chase that followed the 911 call, during which other officers refrained from using force on a visibly troubled man whose only crime was refusing to stop.
As Arboleda tried to drive through a gap between two police vehicles, Officer Andrew Hall jumped out of one of the parked vehicles, ran behind it and fired 10 shots, point blank, through Arboleda’s windshield and passengerside window. Hall told investigators that he fired out of fear Arboleda would run him over and kill him.
But video shows that Hall stepped into the path of the moving car at the last moment, fired immediately and continued to fire even as the car moved past him. The footage suggests Arboleda was trying not to hurt the officer but to get away. Hall did not need to step into the gap or open fire, several experts on police use of force told The Chronicle, and in fact could have opted to simply let Arboleda go, because he wasn’t suspected of a serious crime and could have been approached later.
Other police shootings have sparked uprisings, yet in the San Ramon Valley, the death of an unarmed man during an apparent mental health crisis barely seemed to register. The Contra Costa County Sheriff ’s Office, which provides police services to Danville under a contract with the town, cleared Hall in the shooting with no discipline, records show. And after more than two years, despite the shooting being captured on video, county District Attorney Diana Becton has yet to decide whether to file criminal charges.
Now, as a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Arboleda’s mother inches through the courts, Becton must make her decision under a new light. Last summer’s police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, shifted the ground beneath prosecutors, and Becton’s counterparts in San Francisco and Alameda County have since charged officers with homicide.
The Arboleda shooting touches on many of the most controversial themes in modern policing, chiefly how officers use force and how they are held accountable. This account is based on video footage released by police, transcripts of interviews with officers, audio recordings, interviews with family members and lawyers, records from a county coroner’s inquest, and records from the internal investigation released under the state’s new police transparency law, Senate Bill 1421.
It all stemmed from what seemed like a routine call, as the man in the gray sweatshirt receded into the distance on Laurel Drive, then abruptly turned around.
“He’s actually now southbound on Laurel, on the east side of the road, walking back towards us,” the 911 caller said of Arboleda.
“OK,” the dispatcher responded. “We’ll get someone out there.”
‘HE TRIED SO HARD’
When Arboleda was 3 years old, his mother took him to the Oakland Zoo. He was fascinated by the baboon exhibit, Atienza said, describing how her son had been gaping at the animals when one of them reached through the fence and touched his face. She thinks that’s how he got the illness that set this all in motion.
Arboleda was the youngest of three children, born at a military hospital on Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield to parents who had emigrated from the Philippines. His mother worked as a medical secretary; his father had retired from the Navy. They settled in Vallejo, where Arboleda’s grandmother, who lived in Newark, often looked after him and his older sister and brother.
Shortly after the baboon encounter, Arboleda caught meningitis and had to be rushed to Children’s Hospital Oakland. He was comatose in the intensive care unit, Atienza remembered. His face turned blue, and for a few seconds, his heart flatlined. She watched as the doctors and nurses pumped her son’s chest to revive him.
Something changed in that moment, Atienza said. She links her son’s brush with death, in 1988, to the mental illness that bloomed in him three decades later. Though doctors at the time warned only that Arboleda might suffer hearing loss, which never happened, she believes that somehow — during those seconds when his heart stopped beating — a light also went out in his mind.
In 1989, Arboleda’s parents divorced and his mother moved the children to Newark. She rented a room from her sister while saving money that she used, in 1994, to buy a twobedroom condo in that city. Atienza shared the master bedroom with Arboleda’s older sister, Jennifer, while Arboleda and his older brother, Randy, had bunk beds in the other room, its shelves filled with Legos and G.I. Joe figurines.
Jennifer gave birth to her first child at age 18 and moved in with her inlaws. Randy, who now lives with his fiancee in San Jose, got his own place when he was 22. Only Laudemer stayed home, saying he wanted to protect and care for his mother.
He never had a serious romantic relationship, and Jennifer noticed signs of something amiss: His moods could be stormy, and he fell into periods of deep depression. Sometimes she returned to the condo just to coax him out of bed.
Arboleda didn’t want to be completely dependent on his mother, who bought the groceries and paid the mortgage. He began working long hours as an Amazon courier and took online coding classes, hoping he might eventually use the skills to land a job at Kaiser Permanente, where his mother had spent much of her career. He cooked his own meals: vegetarian food with tofu and chia seeds.
“One of the last conversations I had with him was about school and work,” said Arboleda’s sister, who lives in Discovery Bay and whose married name is Jennifer Leong. She recalls Arboleda telling her he was pursuing an associate degree, but was overwhelmed and tired from delivering packages. “He tried so hard to better his life,” she said.
His behavior became more baffling after Atienza left for a sixweek trip to the Philippines, to celebrate her high school reunion. After she came home, in February 2018, her son began putting duct tape on his forehead and wrapping himself in plastic bags. He lay for long periods meditating in the bathtub; once she saw him reposing inside a dog crate.
One day in April, they were together in the kitchen. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, Arboleda threatened to kill her. She went out to run errands and realized, after a couple of hours, that she was afraid to go home.
She called Newark police, who placed Arboleda on an involuntary “5150” hold, deeming him a threat to himself or others. He was held at John George Psychiatric Hospital in San Leandro for about three weeks and given antipsychotic medications, said the family’s lawyer, Adante Pointer of Oakland, who subpoenaed medical records for the civil rights suit. Atienza later told investigators her son was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.
Eventually, Pointer said, Arboleda became more subdued and compliant, and was no longer subject to the hold. John George referred him to a different inpatient facility, but he never made it there. Instead, he showed up at Atienza’s doorstep in a taxi.
Once Arboleda returned home, his mental health deteriorated, and he refused to take his medication. He wrote messages on pieces of paper and taped them to the walls of the condo. He covered the windows with cardboard or with curtains that he hung, keeping the rooms dark. On many occasions, his family said, Arboleda would lock his mother out of the condo. He once blocked the front door with a refrigerator.
“He thought someone was running after him,” Atienza said.
Even more concerning, he began sprinkling salt on his mother’s patio and on the neighbors’ stairs and walkways, to ward off evil spirits. An upstairs neighbor told investigators that he called police four times in three weeks, because someone — Arboleda, it turned out — kept stuffing items into the lock on his door. Another neighbor threatened to sue Atienza after Arboleda damaged his lock so badly that he had to pay $400 to replace it.
Two days before Arboleda’s death, neighbors called police again. A resident in one of the condos upstairs had opened the front door to find Arboleda on the porch, carrying a backpack. He bolted when the resident confronted him. Officers who arrived later said they couldn’t do anything, because no crime had occurred.
A WINDING PURSUIT
By the time two Danville police cruisers pulled up on the morning of Nov. 3, 2018, Arboleda had climbed into his Honda Civic on Laurel Drive. Deputy Sonasi Maka stepped out of his patrol car, stood in the middle of the street and tried to flag Arboleda down, waving his hands and yelling, “Hey! Hey!”
Arboleda ignored him. Staring straight ahead, he started the car and began tooling south down the road.
Suspiciousperson calls are not unusual in Danville, an affluent town with a low enough crime rate that police will quickly respond to calls about odd solicitors or doorknockers. Usually, it turns out the person is trying to sell something, such as solar panels, said Sgt. Christopher Martin, the shift supervisor that day, who at first disregarded the call about Arboleda.
Maka and his partner, Nicholas Muller, hadn’t expected a dramatic confrontation when they were dispatched to the call at 11:03 a.m. Officer Charles Caruso also responded, as backup, bringing with him a prospective officer who was on a ridealong.
The officers instead found themselves face to face with a man who, they said, wouldn’t make eye contact or react to commands. Confused, the officers hustled back into their cars. In the ensuing pursuit, they witnessed Arboleda commit at least three traffic violations, Maka told investigators: running a stop sign, exceeding the speed limit and failing to yield to officers.
Contra Costa County Sheriff ’s Office policies allow deputies and officers in contract cities to chase people who seek to evade them. The cops are supposed to balance street safety against the risk of letting someone go, considering such factors as the time of day, the traffic volume and the severity of the alleged crime.
That Saturday morning, after the Danville officers asked the dispatcher to run the Honda’s license plate, they knew who they were probably pursuing. They knew the car was registered to Laudemer Arboleda and Jeannie Atienza. They had no indication it was stolen.
As Arboleda passed under Interstate 680, he threw something out of his window. The officers behind him saw “an explosion of white powder,” sheriff ’s Deputy Christopher Stark wrote in a police report. Workers from the sheriff ’s crime lab later gathered white powder from the road and tested it, but the results “came
“Viewed objectively, the actions taken by Office of the Sheriff personnel concerning Mr. Arboleda were legal, proper, and in congruence with Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff policies and procedures.” Investigators’ report submitted to Sheriff David Livingston
back inconclusive,” Detective Matthew Ingersoll testified at a county coroner’s inquest on July 30, 2019.
Pointer, the family attorney, guesses Arboleda had thrown a package of the salt he had been using to keep evil spirits at bay.
While two patrol cars chased Arboleda along treelined, residential streets, Officer Andrew Hall was on the other side of town. He recognized Muller’s voice on his radio: A suspect was fleeing on Laurel Drive, a couple of miles from where Hall was writing a ticket for a seat belt violation.
By that time, Hall had worked for the force for five years. Records obtained from the Sheriff ’s Office through a public records request show Hall was the subject of a previous internal affairs investigation in 2014, when he worked at the county jail in Martinez. An inmate said Hall had “brutally attacked” him.
According to interview transcripts, the inmate said Hall rammed him facefirst into a door while he was handcuffed, punched him several times in the face and body and attempted a “hip toss,” flipping the inmate over so that he landed on Hall and injured the officer’s knee. The inmate suffered a right orbital bone fracture and needed stitches in his lip.
Hall denied striking the inmate. He said he had performed a “leg sweep takedown” after the inmate jabbed Hall with his shoulder. The internal probe exonerated Hall, finding no evidence of unreasonable or excessive force.
Hall finished the traffic stop before climbing back into his patrol car. Again, his radio buzzed. The suspect had driven away and was leading police on a winding pursuit. Hall turned on the lights and siren of his Chevrolet Caprice, a Code 3 response for a dangerous situation that required an immediate response. He hurried west down El Cerro Boulevard.
“We’re gonna call it if he keeps going,” Muller said over the radio, indicating he wanted to abandon the chase if it went into Danville’s downtown.
Less than a minute later, the pursuit nearly ended when officers tried to hold Arboleda at gunpoint as he made a left turn from Hartz Way to River Rock Lane. Caruso told Arboleda to show his hands, and Arboleda obeyed, raising his hands off the steering wheel. But the car crept backward — he’d already put it in reverse. Muller grabbed the driverside door handle and jiggled it, briefly catching Arboleda’s eye.
He had “a zombie look,” Muller told investigators, recalling the moment when Arboleda grabbed the steering wheel again, backed up and drove away. Muller told his colleagues to let Arboleda go and not to shoot at him.
“And I said something to the effect of, you know, ‘If he’s got a way to get out, let him go,’ ” Muller told a detective that night.
“Because, you know, I don’t want anybody, you know,” Muller continued. “Um, I’m thinking of what I’m doing. I’m thinking about Maka. I’m thinking about Caruso. I said, hey, I’d rather in my mind … pursue him than — than shoot him, because he’s — he wasn’t going very fast so far. I mean he was just not stopping.”
The situation faced by Muller — a driver intent on continuing to flee — was similar to the one Officer Hall would soon confront.
As Arboleda drove north on Front Street toward busy Diablo Road, past offices with tidy gardens and a chocolate shop, Hall darted into his path from the other direction. He said later that he’d glimpsed the Honda through a tangle of brush as he approached. For perhaps two seconds, the cars were head to head, a BevMo parking lot to Arboleda’s left and San Ramon Creek to his right. As Arboleda began to steer left, around the police cruiser, Hall jumped out with his gun drawn.
At that same moment, Sgt. Martin, the shift supervisor, pulled onto Front Street behind Hall and stopped his marked Ford Explorer in the roadway. He left a gap just wide enough for a sedan to squeeze through — and Arboleda took the opportunity.
“Oh God, watch out, watch out, watch out — don’t do it!” Maka said in footage captured on Muller’s dashboard camera.
In the space of five seconds, Arboleda maneuvered around Hall’s car. As Arboleda accelerated, Hall stepped into the path of the Honda before taking several steps back when the car kept moving forward. As the car passed, Hall fired his .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol, which had 12 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.
A volley of shots flew through the windshield, and Arboleda seemed to recoil with each one, Hall told investigators. As the car went by, Hall continued shooting through the passengerside window, shattering it.
“Oh shit, he shot him!” an officer, apparently Maka, seemed to shout in the audio recorded by Muller’s dashcam.
Hall told investigators that as he shot Arboleda, he heard the Honda’s engine revving, as though Arboleda’s foot had slammed the accelerator.
Now, with no one steering, the Honda crashed into a Jeep Cherokee — the airbags of both vehicles deploying — and kept going until it hit a curb. Arboleda had nine gunshot wounds, with bullets entering his right arm, shoulder, back and chest. He died from the chest wound; a bullet damaged his heart and left lung, the coroner’s report concluded.
Hall radioed for an ambulance. Using his knife and baton, he broke the driverside window of the Honda so that other officers could pull Arboleda out and begin CPR. Feeling an asthma attack coming on, Hall said he walked to his car and grabbed his inhaler from the trunk. Paramedics arrived and took Arboleda to San Ramon Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 11:44 a.m.
While the ambulance sped away, Hall said he called his girlfriend.
“I was involved in that thing I never want to do, but it happened,” he said.
‘NO EASY WAY TO TELL YOU’
Atienza was attending evening Mass at St. Edward Catholic Church in Newark when her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but called back after the service ended. Senior Inspector Eddie Sousa of the Contra Costa
County District Attorney’s Office wanted to meet. He mentioned her son Laudemer. He wouldn’t provide details.
Confused, Atienza reluctantly agreed to meet with officers at Newark police headquarters, bringing along her sister and brotherinlaw. Officers there led them into a break room, where Sousa and Detective Denny Cai of the Orinda Police Department — also a contract agency of the county Sheriff ’s Office — sat at a round table. They began an interrogation.
In an audio recording provided by the District Attorney’s Office, Sousa grilled Atienza for 11 minutes. He wanted to know when Arboleda’s problems began. Was he using “streettype drugs?” Had he threatened her more than once? How was her son doing? Could she describe his mind? Was he working? What did he do all day?
Atienza told them about her son’s stint in John George, about the neighbors’ frequent calls to law enforcement, about how Arboleda would run away when he saw police officers. “He is so scared — very scared,” she said. Then she asked why the district attorney of another county had become involved in her son’s mental health issues.
“Yeah, no, I’m going to tell you,” Sousa interjected, steering the discussion back to Arboleda’s mental state and probing for details about his father, Philip Arboleda, who had been estranged from the family for years.
The questions kept unspooling. Then Sousa paused a beat. “There’s really no easy way for me to tell you this,” he said. He began recounting the events of that morning, starting with Arboleda’s drive into Danville, where police tried to stop him. “He took them on a highspeed chase,” Sousa said.
“Because he’s paranoid,” Atienza cut in, her voice rising. She explained that her son needed treatment. That she’d tried — unsuccessfully — to get police to take him back to the hospital. That given the chance, he could get better.
Sousa wasn’t finished. Arboleda drove at one of the officers, he told her. The officer fired. The Honda peeled into an intersection and crashed. Arboleda “succumbed to his wounds.”
“Oh, my God!” Atienza cried out.
When she protested, asking why the officer had killed her son, Detective Cai explained that Arboleda was “trying to hit the officer” — weighing in on the central question of an investigation that had just begun.
INTERNAL REVIEW BACKS OFFICERS
After a ninemonth administrative investigation, the sheriff ’s internal affairs division found that Hall and the other officers and deputies in the pursuit had not violated any policies. An incident report
cites two suspected offenses, both by Arboleda: evading an officer and felony assault with a deadly weapon on an officer — the weapon being the Honda. Hall was given three days of paid leave before he was put back to work in the traffic unit.
“Viewed objectively, the actions taken by Office of the Sheriff personnel concerning Mr. Arboleda were legal, proper, and in congruence with Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff policies and procedures,” investigators wrote in the report submitted to Sheriff David Livingston on Aug. 1, 2019.
Firing into moving cars has for years been one of the most debated issues in policing, in part because a vehicle whose driver has been shot can turn into a 3,000pound, unguided missile. For officers who are on foot and fear being hit by a car, the best practice is to do everything possible to get out of the way, said Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law who runs the police accountability project at the University of Chicago.
San Francisco enacted a policy in 2016 to bar officers from shooting at moving cars, except in extreme cases, such as if a motorist were plowing into crowds of bystanders. A similar rule in Los Angeles specifies that the threat posed by the vehicle itself is not enough to justify an officer using deadly force. The Contra Costa County Sheriff ’s Office bans “shooting from or at a moving vehicle, except in the defense of one’s own life or the life of another person.”
In his initial interview with investigators, at about 6:30 p.m. on the day he shot Arboleda, Officer Hall said that when he pointed his gun, he assumed Arboleda would stop, until he saw the “very dazed or cloudy" expression on his face. Watching the Honda lurch forward, he surmised that Arboleda was either intoxicated or “mentally not understanding what was going on.”
“I had no protection, um, that I could take cover behind,” Hall told Inspector Mike Morley of the District Attorney’s Office. “I believed he was gonna ram me, uh, and kill me.”
Hall said in that initial interview that he fired “between four and five rounds” through the windshield, saw Arboleda react with each one, and then watched him turn the wheels left — toward Sgt. Martin. “I now feared that he was gonna try and strike Sgt. Martin,” Hall said, adding that he then unloaded another four or five rounds, before the car straightened out.
After watching the videos of the shooting, however, Hall requested another interview, records show. At 8 p.m., he revised his statement, saying he had fired continuously as Arboleda rolled “past my car and Sgt. Martin’s car.”
Livingston, who declined to be interviewed for this story, vigorously defended Hall after the shooting. In public statements, the sheriff accused Arboleda of “trying to run down and murder” a police officer, even though video of the killing showed Hall stepping into the Honda’s path at the last moment, and then shooting as he retreated.
When Atienza’s attorney, John Burris of Oakland, argued that Arboleda’s Filipino race played into the Danville officers’ decision to pursue and shoot him, Livingston accused Burris of “reaching for his wellworn race card.”
The Sheriff ’s Office was unable to produce traffic stop data that might illuminate whether Danville officers treat drivers of color more aggressively than white motorists. A spokesperson said the office began collecting and reporting such data this year, under a new state law.
At one point in the pursuit, when the officers briefly lost track of Arboleda, Caruso asked a bystander whether he had seen a Honda with a “little Asian guy driving.” Neither Caruso nor a spokesperson for the Sheriff ’s Office responded to questions about whether that language was appropriate.
Hall’s attorney, Michael Rains, acknowledged that many people might watch the video and conclude that Arboleda did not intend to hit Hall. Rains said officers are not legally required to wait until they are struck by a vehicle to figure out a driver’s intentions. “The human body experiences some narrowing of the useful field of view under stress,” Rains said. “The officer’s perception is that the car poses an immediate danger of death or serious bodily injury, and maybe I can get the driver to go in a different direction if I shoot.”
The Chronicle asked six police useofforce experts to evaluate the footage of the shooting. Four of them, including Futterman, saw no justification for the shooting and were alarmed that the internal investigation had found no policy violations. They said the incident should have been resolved without gunfire and noted mistakes, beginning with the urgent pursuit of a man not suspected of committing a crime, and ending when Hall moved in front of a driver who appeared to be trying to evade capture.
Hall created “a deadly situation where none needed to exist,” Futterman said.
To former Boston police Lt. Tom Nolan, Sheriff Livingston’s explanation that Arboleda had tried to murder Hall seemed “contrived.” Nolan, an associate professor of sociology at Emmanuel College in Boston, said, “A car isn’t a weapon, I’m sorry. That went out in the 1980s.” Futterman and Timothy Williams, a retired senior detective supervisor from the Los Angeles Police Department, both raised questions about the internal investigation. “It bothers me that the department found that the officer was in policy,” Williams said. “If it’s a strike, you gotta call the strike.”
LaDoris Cordell, a retired Santa Clara County Superior Court judge and former watchdog of San Jose’s police force, said she saw evidence of seconddegree murder, which requires “implied malice” — that a person engaged in an intentional, unlawful act with conscious disregard for the risk to human life.
Cordell said the district attorney could plausibly have two reasons not to charge Hall: She agrees with the selfdefense claim, or believes no prosecutor could persuade a jury to convict the officer.
Charles Key, a former Baltimore police lieutenant who runs a consulting group in Virginia, said he couldn’t tell from the video alone whether Hall had “the legal right” to shoot Arboleda.
Martinezbased police trainer Don Cameron viewed the shooting differently from the others, saying it “appears to be justified” because Arboleda was driving toward Hall. He said it was reasonable for Hall to continue firing as the car passed, because there is a “lag time” of between a second and a second and a half to turn off a shooting stream.
“It’s the way the mind works,” he said, comparing the act to a person deciding to stop a car, then pressing on the brake.
Hall used similar language when he testified at the coroner’s inquest in July 2019. “So it was all in one continuous motion,” the officer said, describing the moment he saw a threat, began firing, watched the vehicle pass, felt the danger subside, and put his gun down.
GRIEF TAKES HOLD
They buried Arboleda in a plot at Chapel of the Chimes Memorial Park in Hayward, alongside his grandmother and uncle. The headstone is visible through the fence on Mission Boulevard, and on a windy day this past November it was decorated with pinwheels and Christmas ornaments. Atienza said she has tried to lay flowers at the site of the shooting, next to San Ramon Creek in Danville, but someone keeps removing them.
“I just can’t accept that he’s gone,” Atienza said, kneeling in the grass by her son’s grave, trying to strike a match to light a candle. She carried a purse filled with family photos, one of which showed Laudemer at age 3. His cheeks were swollen from medication, prescribed to quell the meningitis.
Grief and frustration have clawed at Arboleda’s family. His sister said her marriage of 22 years was starting to unravel. Her children, angered by their uncle’s death, took part in this summer’s nationwide protests against police brutality. Atienza complained of insomnia and trouble focusing.
In December 2019, Burris did something unusual. He sent letters to Becton, the district attorney, as well as to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, urging them to prosecute the case. “This is one I feel really strongly about,” Burris said in an interview. “Particularly after seeing the video.”
Since Arboleda was shot, and especially after an officer kneeled on the neck of George Floyd, police killings have been scrutinized more intensely.
In September, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley charged a San Leandro officer with voluntary manslaughter for shooting a man who was holding a baseball bat in a Walmart. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is prosecuting three officers he believes used excessive force. He charged one with manslaughter, assault and other charges for fatally shooting a man, and another with assault, battery and other charges for allegedly beating a man with a baton. A grand jury indicted a third officer for assault after he shot and wounded a man.
These charging decisions coincided with a new state law that seeks to hold police to a higher standard. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 392, which restricts officers from using deadly force unless it is “necessary” to prevent an immediate threat to someone’s life, or to catch a person fleeing after committing a violent felony. Arboleda, though, was killed before the law’s passage, meaning Hall must be judged on whether he used “reasonable” force.
Becton, who successfully ran for district attorney as a reformer in 2018, is believed to be on Newsom’s list of possible nominees to replace state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, President Biden’s nominee for secretary of health and human services. She hasn’t given any indication of whether she may file charges against Hall. Historically, criminal cases against officers are unheardof in Contra Costa County: Prosecutors have not charged an officer with murder or manslaughter in a fatal useofforce case in recent decades.
The district attorney declined to be interviewed for this story, but her office sent a statement saying she is taking a new “teambased” approach to investigating such fatal incidents, assigning several experienced attorneys to review and make final decisions on police shootings and incustody deaths.
While awaiting Becton’s decision, Atienza is renting an apartment in unincorporated Alameda County. She still pays the mortgage on the condo in Newark, but doesn’t want to return, explaining that it’s haunted by painful memories.
Every day, she wakes up at 4 a.m. She sits up on the living room couch that doubles as a bed, a shaft of light flickering from the television that she never turns off.
At 5 a.m., a Mass comes on the Catholic channel, followed by a prayer. Clutching her rosary beads, she chants the Apostles’ Creed: He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
Atienza never used to wake up this early.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “It’s just — my eyes would open.”
Even as she sits alone, seeking comfort from the background noise of the television, Atienza can feel her son hovering. He hadn’t received the sacrament, asking for God’s grace, before he died. His story, she said, is not finished.