Jury awards $21M to family of pregnant teen killed by Fremont police
SAN JOSE >> In a landmark verdict that's one of the highest of its kind nationwide, a federal jury awarded $21 million in damages to the family of pregnant 16-year-old Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon, who was fatally shot by Fremont police more than five years ago.
The seven-member jury found Friday night that three Fremont officers acted negligently during a covert operation in Hayward that ended with officers firing rifles into a moving BMW, killing Mondragon, who was a passenger in the car. Attorneys for the city argued to jurors that the driver, not police, was responsible for her death.
The city of Fremont will be on the hook for about $10.2 million of that amount, which would likely be the largest single payout resulting from a lawsuit against the city's Police Department in its history. The man who was allegedly driving the BMW was ordered to pay the remaining amount.
“We hope a verdict like this sends the message that police departments need to humble themselves in the face of community demands that they do better,” said Adante Pointer, an attorney for Mondragon's mother.
It is one of the biggest payouts ever for a police killing — not the largest, but certainly larger than many similar incidents that have made national headlines. The George Floyd murder in Minneapolis led to a $27 million lawsuit settlement, while the family of Breonna Taylor settled a suit with Louisville, Kentucky, police for $12 million, for instance. Last December, a jury in Austin awarded $67 million to the family of a man killed by police, and three months ago, a San Diego jury returned an $85 million verdict in a wrongful death suit alleging police beat and tased a man to death.
In the Bay Area, recent lawsuit settlements have included figures as high as $7.3 million for officers in Pittsburg who kneeled on top of a man and didn't notice that he was dying for several minutes, as well as a combined $9.4 million settlements for the families of two men killed by the same Contra Costa sheriff's deputy within a three-year span.
Lawsuits over police killings rarely go to trial in the Bay Area. That's one of the things that made Mondragon's case unique.
Melissa Nold, one of the family's attorneys, said she was surprised the city didn't settle.
“This is the type of case you do settle,” she said Friday night.
“Regardless of whether you feel like you had some sort of justification for why you were there and what you were doing, when the result is accidentally killing a child, that would be the kind of case to settle,” she said.
“They banked that nobody was going to care about Ebbie. That's what I believe. They looked at the situation and who she was and who her family was and decided that her life didn't matter, that her life didn't have value.”
Mondragon, an Antioch resident, was one of four people inside a car driven by 19-year-old Rico Tiger, who authorities said was responsible for multiple violent armed robberies in Fremont and around the Bay Area. The Southern Alameda County Major Crimes Task Force, composed of members of multiple law enforcement agencies, were tracking a stolen BMW that Tiger was driving to the City View Apartment complex in Hayward on March 14, 2017.
Tiger was charged with murdering Mondragon under the state's provocative act doctrine, which holds people liable when someone else uses lethal self-defense. That case is still pending.
Fremont Sgt. Jeremy Miskella and officers Ghailan Chahouati and Joel Hernandez were part of the task force, which planned to block Tiger's car in the complex's parking lot with an undercover police minivan and arrest him.