DA won’t charge officer who sicced dog on innocent man
A Palo Alto police officer who sicced his dog on an innocent man during a suspect search in Mountain View last summer will not be charged with any crimes, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
Joel Domingo Alejo was asleep in a back yard on Sierra
Vista Avenue in Mountain View in the early morning hours of June 25 when Nicholas Enberg, whose title is police agent, ordered his police dog to attack Alejo.
Enberg had headed to Mountain View to help that city’s police search for a man who allegedly kidnapped his ex-girlfriend, drove her a short distance, then pushed her out of the car before taking her phone and running away. Mountain View police said their own K-9 officers were not available at the time.
Police had gotten consent to search a back yard but said the residents didn’t know that Alejo, a relative, was still there following a birthday party held the previous day. Alejo, who was sleeping in a shed area, was bitten within seconds of Enberg entering the yard, and afterward trailing Mountain View officers determined he was not the man they were looking for.
In a statement to this news organization, Assistant District Attorney Brian Welch said the use of force did not trigger a compulsory review by his office because Alejo’s injuries were not life-threatening. But amid public scrutiny after Alejo filed liability claims against the two cities, Palo Alto police submitted the reports to the DA’s office for review.
“Based on our review of the case materials, we have concluded that Agent Enberg’s use of his police dog did not result in the use of excessive force under the color of authority,” Welch said in the statement.
The Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley NAACP, said he was extremely disappointed with the
decision, calling it “a sad day.”
“It’s not fair. What has to happen for it to be important enough to do something?” he said. “The whole thing is asinine. If (Alejo) stabbed that dog because he was startled, he would have been charged. We just want equal treatment under the law.”
LaDoris Cordell, a retired Superior Court judge, former Palo Alto councilmember and former San Jose police auditor, said she did not object to prosecutors’ finding of no criminal liability for Enberg. But, she added, that finding is peripheral to what she calls the “horrifying” conduct by officers that night, and still exposes the police department to civil liability.
“If it’s not a crime, the issue becomes, what policies and procedures permitted this to happen?” she said.
Cordell cited Palo Alto police duty manual sections governing the use of police dogs requiring officers, whenever possible, to announce themselves to people before ordering their animals to bite and detain someone. While Cordell joins prosecutors in considering the fact that Enberg was startled when encountering a man he wasn’t expecting to be in the yard, she said that did not warrant the officer to send the dog in so quickly.
“Officers have to give a warning, and say ‘Police are here, don’t move,’ and that wasn’t done,” Cordell said. “That was the first thing that jumped out at me.”
The Palo Alto Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment made on its media-inquiry web portal Monday. In body-camera footage released by the city of Palo Alto earlier this month, Enberg is heard yelling commands and the dog continues to bite Alejo as other officers grab the man by his legs and arms and tell him to “give up” and “stop resisting.”
Alejo screams in pain and tries to cover his face. The dog bit the man for nearly a minute before an officer ordered the animal to stop and pulled the dog away.
Given the totality of the circumstances, Cordell says Enberg “was not relieved from giving a warning” before moving in with his dog.
“These officers were armed, and the man was in a corner,” she said. “If they went in and all they had were guns, if they didn’t have a dog, would they have just started firing bullets at him? No.”
She added that she was also taken aback by how officers did not voice any remorse to Alejo at the scene, after they realized he was innocent.
“There’s nothing in their policy that says they should apologize, but give me a break,” Cordell said. “This was a human being whose leg was ripped up.”
Alejo filed dual $20 million liability claims against the Palo Alto and Mountain View, both of which were denied by the cities, according to the Palo Alto Daily Post. In the claims, Alejo stated the dog was ordered to “viciously attack and maul” him, causing “extreme pain, bleeding, bruising,” and “emotional distress, fear, terror, anxiety, humiliation, loss of sense of security, dignity, and pride.”
A 29-year-old man was arrested about a month later in connection with the kidnapping report. The case involving Alejo is currently the subject of a review by the city’s independent police auditor.
Enberg has been the subject of public and legal attention for other highprofile uses of force involving Palo Alto police. On Christmas Day in 2015, he and another officer fatally shot a man experiencing a psychiatric emergency outside a mental health treatment center, after the man charged at an officer while holding a knife.
In 2018, the city paid a Black high school student and his family $250,000 to settle a civil-rights lawsuit stemming from a 2016 encounter where a police dog jumped out of the window of a police vehicle and bit the boy, who had been stopped by police officers — including Enberg — responding to calls about a teen seen carrying a BB gun. The boy was never charged with a crime.