Shootings by police exposed by records law
Access to probes that delve into ‘suicide by cop’
Moments before he was shot and wounded by a police officer while allegedly holding a BB gun that looked like a pistol, a 25-year-old Windsor man, distraught and crying, tossed a crumpled piece of paper out of his car in a church parking lot.
“Thank you for doing this favor for me because I did not have the courage to do it,” the man had handwritten in Spanish, according to a translation by police. “My life has no meaning on this land, this was the only way to leave this land that everything was a disaster for me. And to my family and mother, I ask forgiveness, I had to do this.”
The man signed his name and thanked the “officer.”
Under a landmark California law, the public this year is gaining access to long-secret police records describing investigations into officers’ actions on the job. On Friday, a San Francisco
Superior Court judge handed another victory to the law’s supporters with a tentative ruling requiring state Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office to turn over a vast trove of records in its possession.
While the law, Senate Bill 1421, is exposing many incidents of misconduct, the new files are also surfacing new details on the phenomenon of suicide by cop, in which despondent individuals threaten officers to provoke them to shoot.
The confrontation in Windsor on Jan. 30, 2017, outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, was such a case, according to an internal affairs report released this month by the Sonoma County Sheriff ’s Office. The deputy who shot the man in the stomach, as well as a second deputy who struck him with a hard sponge projectile, acted in perceived selfdefense and abided by policy, the office concluded.
The Chronicle is not naming the man, who survived, because of the sensitive nature of the case.
Studies of suicides and attempted suicides by cop estimate they make up 10% to 36% of police shootings. Some cases feature advance planning by individuals too scared to kill themselves, while other incidents are more sudden, with suspects who face criminal consequences deciding that the only way out is to die at the hands of those coming to arrest them.
One expert found that 13% of apparent suicide-by-cop deaths included a pre-written letter absolving the officers of wrongdoing. Such was the case in the fatal 2015 San Francisco shooting of Matthew Hoffman, 32, who allegedly aimed an airsoft pistol at officers. A suicide note discovered later on his phone stated, “You had no other choice.”
Suicides by cop can be particularly traumatic for officers, who in the aftermath realize they weren’t responding to a real threat but rather a person who is “basically dragging the officer into a self-execution,” said Alison Berry Wilkinson, a San Rafael attorney who represents police officers around Northern California.
“An officer can’t in that split second know what is going on in the head of an individual who is holding the gun and they don’t have X-ray vision to know if the gun is loaded. They have to make a decision based on the actions,” she said. “It’s not what officers want to do or what they are trained to do, and it takes a huge toll.”
Also under Senate Bill 1421, Santa Rosa police recently released internal reports and body-camera video from a 2016 incident in which a despondent 15-year-old boy allegedly pointed a pellet gun at an officer, who thought the gun was real and shot the boy in the foot.
“I know what you’re going through! Don’t do it!” Santa Rosa police Officer Brian Fix can be heard screaming on his body-camera footage moments before shooting.
At the hospital, a detective spoke to the boy, who said he tried to get shot by police because he figured it would be the least painful way to die, according to the report.
“(He) told me he did this because he was under a lot of stress over his grades at school,” the detective wrote. “He had plans to go into the military and felt that his lowering grades was going to preclude him from achieving his goals.”
Officers found a suicide note, along with multiple goodbye texts to friends he had sent moments before he called police to report a man in the park with a gun. His father told police that his son had thought of pursuing a career as a peace officer.
Often, prosecutors are more lenient when they consider filing charges against people who survive suicide-by-cop scenarios and are deemed to have had no intent of hurting officers, said Sonoma County Public Defender Kathleen Pozzi.
The Windsor man shot in the stomach pleaded guilty to two counts of felony obstructing or resisting police. He served six months in jail once he was released from the hospital.
“With these suicide-by-cop cases, unfortunately it doesn’t mean that what they did didn’t constitute a crime,” said Pozzi, whose office represented the man. She said part of the man’s plea deal included mandatory mental health counseling.
According to the newly released files, the shooting unfolded about 8:30 p.m. The first officer at the scene knocked on the fogged window of the man’s Nissan Maxima and found him on his cell phone, crying, with what appeared to be a black handgun on his lap, investigators said.
For a half hour, police negotiated with the man, with a Spanish-speaking officer trying to persuade him to surrender over his car’s PA system. Police later interviewed the relative who was on the other end of the man’s cell phone call. The relative told police the man had said he wanted to kill himself and had tried to do so in the past by swallowing pills.
“(The relative) stated that (the man) was suicidal because of his homosexuality,” one officer reported.
The man exited the car a couple of times before climbing back inside. After about a half hour of negotiations, he stepped out and placed his hands on top of the car as ordered, but reached back inside, multiple officers reported.
Deputy Eric Seibold fired a projectile, which caused the man to turn, officers said. Deputy Brian Parks told detectives he was 99% sure he saw the man holding a handgun at that point and fired his service weapon once, hitting the man in the stomach and dropping him to the ground.
The report indicated multiple police body cameras were activated in the incident, but no footage was released.
Three days after the shooting, Detective Joseph Horsman interviewed the man in the hospital.
“He explained how the deputies did not shoot him the first time he emerged from his car, so he grabbed the air gun the second time he emerged from the car,” Horsman wrote. “He said he had the gun pointed downward and never actually pointed it at the deputies. He admitted wanting the deputies to shoot him though.”