Man who lost eye leads class-action suit
SAN JOSE >> A man who lost an eye from being hit by a police projectile during the heart of last summer’s George Floyd demonstrations in downtown San Jose is among several plaintiffs in a new federal lawsuit filed against the city and Police Department.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday and seeks classaction status for the scores of people injured by officers’ prolific use of rubber bullets and chemical weapons. It is the largest lawsuit filed from the fallout from the summer protests.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco Bay Area and three prominent police misconduct litigators who authored the filing also are asking courts to compel wholesale changes in police training and policies that authorized the violence that drew national infamy to the city.
Michael Acosta, a 49-year-old downtown San Jose resident, was running errands the afternoon of May 29 when he came upon passionate but increasingly contentious demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a few days earlier. What he didn’t know was that police were closing in on the aftermath of a scene in which a man was arrested after driving his SUV into a crowd of demonstrators.
Within moments, Acosta said he was hit “in the eye with an impact munition” fired by San Jose police officers, according to the lawsuit.
At a Zoom news conference March 11, Acosta described how he would later learn that his eye was ruptured and that removing it was the best hope for preserving vision in his remaining eye.
“Everything happened so fast,” Acosta said. “It was honestly terrifying. I felt helpless and afraid.”
Acosta, who now uses a prosthetic, added that he lost months of work and continues to suffer numbness on the left side of his face. He also said his vision has decreased, marked by problems focusing and seeing at night.
“I have only acquired a limited sense of normalcy,” he said, adding that he just recently drove for the first time in nine months. “The world seems darker sometimes.”
Another plaintiff, Joseph Cañas, also was hit in the eye by a police munition as he played guitar during the same day of protests as Acosta. Other plaintiffs described being hit by munitions, bludgeoned by officers, injured by tear gas and other chemical weapons. They also described suffering from residual effects including post-traumatic stress.
Recently elected Assembly member Alex Lee is also a plaintiff who counts himself among several people claiming to have been wrongfully arrested for violating a controversial curfew set by the city in early June, which was rescinded after a few days and ultimately did not yield any criminal charges or citations for standalone violations.
Besides the city, the defendants in the lawsuit include Mayor Sam Liccardo, City Manager David Sykes, former Police Chief Eddie Garcia, Capt. Jason Dwyer, Sgt. Ronnie Lopez, Sgt. Lee Tassio and officers Jared Yuen, Sean Michael
Curry and Fnu Delgado.
Yuen drew particular infamy after he appeared on viral videos profanely antagonizing protesters. He also has been named in at least two other lawsuits stemming from the protests.
The Police Department declined to comment on the lawsuit because of it being pending litigation.
Liccardo and the City Attorney’s Office cited the same grounds in also declining to comment.
A statement from the San Jose Police Officers’ Association did not directly challenge the lawsuit but said that over 100 officers were injured in the protest response.
The union also blamed the outcome at least partly on being short-handed: “San Jose’s chronic Police Department understaffing was unfortunately on full display.”
The Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Josesilicon NAACP, which is an organizational plaintiff along with the San Jose Peace and Justice Center, tearfully recalled trying to broker peace between demonstrators and police near City Hall on May 29, only to get ensnared in violent clashes during which he said young girls were manhandled.
He excoriated the leadership that allowed officers to resort to the violent tactics that followed and said he could hear officers voice reluctance against those commands.
“It’s been a travesty for the leadership of this city not to step out and do more for those who were injured and those who were arrested wrongly for running or defending themselves from the aggressiveness of the police,” Moore said.
Rachel Lederman, a civil rights attorney who authored the lawsuit with the lawyers committee and attorneys Jim Chanin and Michael Flynn, also specifically addressed the projectiles fired at protesters, calling it “too dangerous and it’s an unlawful use of force in this context.”
Amid the protest-response backlash, the Police Department prohibited the use of rubber bullets solely for crowd control. Liccardo later proposed an outright ban on the munitions in crowds, but it was not approved by the City Council.
The lawsuit also alleges that Black people and people of color got targeted attention by police during the protests.
The filing cited how Cañas was the subject of insults in a now-defunct San Jose police alumni Facebook group in which current and former SJPD officers appeared to have made Islamophobic and other bigoted comments.
“This display of force was an egregious disregard of San Jose residents’ right to freely express their disapproval of violent and discriminatory policing,” said Tifanei Ressl-moyer, a fellow with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s time for the city to reconcile with the harm its police have caused, to interrupt its culture of White supremacy and to end a legacy of violence.”
Acosta said he remains resolute in fighting against police and government interference in protests.
“I regret losing my eye. I regret getting shot in the face,” Acosta said. “But I do not regret sharing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.”