Beaten man leaving Vallejo after settlement
Handyman Carl Edwards was welding the fence at the side of his Tennessee Street building when a Vallejo police officer approached him. Seconds later, Edwards was bleeding — tackled to the ground, choked and punched repeatedly in the head. Blood gushed from his busted nose, pooling on the concrete as the officer wrapped his arm around Edwards’ neck in a carotid restraint, a pressure maneuver designed to cause unconsciousness.
A second officer tried the same hold, a video from an officer’s body camera shows. Yet another punched and kneed Edwards as he lay on his stomach. The ruckus brought people streaming from Nation’s Giant Hamburgers, on the corner, to watch.
“Why are you guys doing this?” Edwards pleaded between wails of agony.
As it turns out, Edwards wasn’t the guy they were looking for on July 30, 2017. He didn’t match the age or description in either looks or clothing. On Thursday, Vallejo agreed to pay Edwards $ 750,000 to settle the civil rights lawsuit he filed against the city, Spencer Muniz-Bottomley, who was then a Vallejo police officer, and three other Vallejo officers.
“I couldn’t believe it when all of a sudden I was being
choked,” Edwards, 53, said. “When I heard more sirens coming, I thought, ‘ Thank God, these guys are going to tell these guys to back off.’ And they just jumped in.”
Edwards, who lost consciousness twice, said he felt like the officers were trying to kill him. And get this: He was charged with violently resisting during the arrest, but police bodycam footage calls that charge into question. Still, it took the Solano County district attorney 14 months to dismiss the charges against Edwards, citing lack of sufficient evidence.
“They’re not just not charging the cops,” said Michael Haddad, Edwards’ attorney. “They’re charging innocent people who the cops victimize.”
Edwards’ case is indicative of an inexplicable lack of accountability in the Vallejo Police Department, and a culture that too often excuses away excessive useofforce claims, allowing the abuse to continue. Vallejo is no exception to national trends showing people of color often are disproportionately victims of police misconduct. But Edwards is white, and his case shows that in Vallejo nobody’s immune.
Edwards was fixing his fence that summer day, wearing a gray shirt and tan pants. He had no clue that a neighbor had called police about a man in a white tank top and black jeans chasing children and using a slingshot to hit them with rocks.
“Hey Spencer, go contact the guy across the street, brown pants, gray shirt. He’s standing at the corner next to the fence,” an officer can be heard on police radio, directing Muniz-Bottomley toward Edwards.
Just 17 seconds after he parked his car, Muniz-Bottomley, now employed by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, was wrestling with Edwards. The video shows Edwards yelling in pain while then Sgt. Steve Darden delivered knee strikes to Edwards’ body. Video filmed by a bystander shows Darden kneeing and punching Edwards.
“It takes all of you guys to do this? I wasn’t even fighting you guys,” Edwards said after being handcuffed.
Muniz-Bottomley was accused of beating DeJean Hall in March 2017, which was also captured on video. The city settled Hall’s excessive use of force claim for $ 75,000 in June 2019, according to city records.
Brutal encounters like Edwards and Hall experienced are coming under review by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. His “review and reform agreement” comes amid controversy over a Vallejo officer’s June 2 killing of Sean Monterrosa, a 22yearold San Franciscan. The killing is under investigation by the OIR Group, a police oversight company, and Becerra’s office is investigating the alleged destruction of evidence — the truck’s shattered windshield.
Less than two weeks after Monterrosa’s death, a 70page report on the department’s practices by the OIR Group was released. The report found that the department wasn’t properly reviewing use off orce incidents, among other things.
In July, the department’s troubles deepened when a former captain told Open Vallejo, a nonprofit news site, that some officers had altered their badges — bending one tip of a sevenpoint star — to mark that they had killed people.
Since 2003, Vallejo and its municipal insurer have paid out more than $ 15 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits, according to city records. In September, the city agreed to pay $ 5.7 million to the family of Ronell Foster, who was fatally shot by Vallejo police Officer Ryan McMahon. It was the largest settlement for a civil rights violation in the city’s history, according to the city attorney’s office.
Vallejo is facing more than 20 use-of-force and civil rights claims and lawsuits. I asked City Manager Greg Nyhoff if he was concerned the cases could cripple the city, which is hurting financially. Could it lead to filing for bankruptcy protection again? Unable to pay wages and pensions in 2008, Vallejo declared bankruptcy.
“I told the city, I would never bring them into bankruptcy,” Nyhoff told me. “That being said, I will tell you I am extremely concerned about the number of civil rights cases and the kind of financial settlements that, when I first started here, we were talking $ 4 or $ 5 million worth, for all those. Now we’re talking $ 50 ( million).”
In 2017, the California Joint Powers Risk Management Authority, the agency that served as the city’s insurance company for about three decades, notified Vallejo that if it didn’t agree to boost its deductible from $ 500,000 to $ 2.5 million, it would be removed from the pool. Vallejo instead joined Prism, or Public Risk Innovation, Solutions and Management, a risksharing pool.
In October, the city declared a public safety emergency intended to speed up reform initiatives for the Police Department. In June, the department banned carotid holds.
Edwards was so shaken by the incident that he built a fence in front of his building. It’s made out of 6inchthick steel that’s 7 feet high. The fence’s panels are 6foot wood slats that spin. You can see through the barricade, but you can’t get through it. Not even a cop.
“Police need to understand that when they brutalized someone like they did Carl, it’s not a oneoff event,” Haddad said. “It changed Carl’s life.”
Edwards told me he’s leaving Vallejo in the next month.
“I’m moving. I gotta get out of here,” he said. “I’m gone.”