Use of force in jaywalker’s death ruled OK
Lawyer for Chinedu Okobi's family says racial profiling is at the root of fatal confrontation
REDWOOD CITY >> The San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies who killed with a stun gun and beat an unarmed jaywalker in Millbrae last year acted within use-of-force polices, according to the findings of an internal affairs investigation.
The four deputies and a sergeant already had been cleared of criminal misconduct in the death of Chinedu Okobi, 36. Okobi was crossing El Camino Real when a deputy tried to stop him, setting off the deadly encounter and, later, protests over the deputies’ actions.
The death also has the county moving to change its stun gun policies. That could happen this month. Okobi’s Oct. 3, 2018, killing was the third in the county last year involving a stun gun.
Deputy Joshua Wang used his stun gun on Okobi seven times. He and Deputies John DeMartini, Alyssa Lorenzatti and Bryan Watt and Sgt. David Weidner also beat Okobi with batons and peppersprayed him. All five were cleared this year of criminal conduct.
The release of the internal investigation shows the reasoning behind the department’s finding that the officers’ use of force was within department policies. The investigation found “Wang’s use of the Taser was reasonable given the totality of the circumstances and the level of resistance he and the other deputies met when trying to detain/arrest Okobi,” Sgt. Jonathon Sebring, wrote in a 41-page report released under Senate Bill 1421, the state’s police transparency law that went into effect this year. The five officers “conducted themselves in a
professional manner during this incident given the circumstances they were met with.”
Okobi had punched Wang in the face early in the encounter, according to the report.
Okobi’s mother and 12-year-old daughter filed federal civil rights lawsuits against the county in May, claiming the deputies used excessive force and that Okobi was stopped for crossing the street midblock because of racial profiling. Okobi was black.
“We hope the legacy of this is that it requires more oversight of law enforcement and that there are consequences when law enforcement oversteps,” his mother, Ebele Okobi, said when the suits were filed. “It is not a legacy we wanted him to have, but now that we are in this situation, that’s what we hope his legacy is.”
Oakland Civil Rights lawyer John Burris, who is representing the family, said Friday that Chinedu Okobi’s death was especially “traumatic to the African American community. Here’s a black man walking down the street minding his own business and someone thinks
he doesn’t belong there and 30 minutes later he’s dead.”
In legal papers, the county denied the allegations against the deputies.
Burris said the Sheriff’s Department should “be given some credit” for its willingness to review its Taser policies, calling it “a major deal.”
Chinedu Okobi’s killing took a controversial turn on social media in March when the Sheriff’s Department’s official Twitter account “liked” tweets making light of his death and defending the actions of the five deputies while investigations were ongoing. Two of the tweets later were unliked.
A spokeswoman for Sheriff Carlos Bolanos previously said the likes were meant to acknowledge community support for the office, not the content of the tweets. The department didn’t respond to questions from this news organization asking who manages the office’s Twitter account.