Family dedicates bench to daughter
Parents now advocates for training after police shooting left her dead
SAN JOSE — Saturday’s annual festival and fundraiser for the Cambrian Park Little League was the kind of day Diana Showman would have loved: carefree kids in baseball uniforms and painted faces, jumping around an inflatable bounce house and shrieking with joy.
It’s why Showman’s family and the league chose the joyous occasion — not her birthday or the anniversary of the summer day in 2014 when a San Jose police officer shot her dead — to dedicate a nearby wooden bench and metal plaque in her memory, surrounded by hundreds of spectators and dozens of her friends.
“She spent many happy times here, whether coaching, playing or umpiring,” her father, Jim Showman, told the crowd as he held a microphone near home plate in a ball field behind the Steindorf School.
His daughter, he explained, had a passion for sports, especially baseball and softball. She was good enough at age 7 that she joined the boys’ Little League team.
Not long after Jim Showman’s tribute to his daughter, he made his way across the diamond to stand next to the memorial bench with his wife, Vickie. “I find it a peaceful spot,” he said.
The couple talked about the death of their 19-yearold daughter as if it were yesterday:
On the morning of Aug. 14, 2014, Diana Showman had called 911, claiming she had locked her mother and brother in a bedroom of the duplex and would shoot them with her “Uzi” if the police didn’t respond. In fact, no one else was at home at the time.
According to San Jose police and witnesses — some of whom captured the encounter on cellphone video — Showman emerged from her home with a cordless drill in one hand and a cell phone in the other. She dropped the phone but kept the drill, which she had spray-painted black and which resembled a gun, and continued walking toward the officers, defying their orders to drop it. As she got close to San Jose police Officer Wakana Okuma, the officer fired a single shot into her chest.
A year later, the couple filed a wrongful-death lawsuit in federal court. But the suit didn’t get far.
Santa Clara County prosecutors concluded that the officer acted in self-defense and used reasonable force when she fired at Showman in front of her father’s West San Jose duplex.
According to a report by prosecutors, Jim Showman told police that his adopted daughter had exhibited signs of mental illness since she was 3 and was diagnosed as bipolar when she was 6. Over the years, she had tried to kill herself several times — including by drinking liquid detergent — and there were times when her father had to subdue her physically.
The Showmans became tireless advocates for better and more training for police officers in dealing with mental-health episodes. They helped bring attention to two state Senate bills that were signed in 2015 by Gov. Jerry Brown. The measures mandated such training for police academies and departments.
And the parents did receive a settlement of sorts: The city donated the memorial bench and plaque to honor their daughter and the volunteer work she did with Cambrian Park Little League. Importantly, the couple also will be able to give their input to San Jose police and its crisis intervention training as a way of preventing a similar tragedy.