Images from the camera of a California police officer’s frame of an arrest that left a 26-year-old man dead and released Tuesday, contradicting the department’s past sanitized account of what happened.
In a brief published last week, Alameda police said Mario Gonzalez had died after “a physical altercation” with police during which he “had a medical emergency. “
What the video really shows, and what the police didn’t mention at the time, is that the officers immobilized him against the floor for just over five minutes, applying tension to his back with one knee, until he lost consciousness.
Gonzalez died in police custody on April 19, a day before former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder.
Gonzalez’s mother, Edith Arenales, said at a news convention Tuesday after the video that police were “lying to him” was being broadcast, describing the incident that led to her son’s death.
“They broke my circle of relatives for no reason, ” he said.
Officers met with Gonzalez as they responded to “two separate reports of a guy who gave the impression of being under the influence and a suspect in a imaginable robbery,” according to the department’s initial press release.
Police issued the two 911 calls that preceded the incident. In the first, the appellant reported that a guy “was talking to himself” and “didn’t make sense. “
“He’s not doing anything wrong, he’s just scaring my wife,” said the caller.
At the time of the call, the appellant stated that Gonzalez had “two Walgreens baskets with bottles of alcohol that seem to break the protective labels. “
In the pictures of the framing chamber (warning: other people would possibly place him as disturbing) of the incident, you can see an officer approaching Gonzalez, who only in a park with two baskets of groceries, he and the officer communicate quietly for several minutes. Gonzalez is disoriented and struggles to answer questions like his name.
Then two police officers check to arrest Gonzalez, continually check the exit to pull his hands on his back and eventually push him to the ground. The two officers can be seen above Gonzalez, immobilizing him to the ground, as you can hear screaming.
At some point, you can hear an officer asking if he can turn it to one side, to which the other officer replies: “I don’t need to lose what I have. “
Then you can hear one of the officers to the other: “We have no weight on his chest. arrangement. . . No, no, no weight, no weight.
But officials then learned that Gonzalez had lost consciousness and administration of CPR until emergency medical lifeguards arrived.
The incident is being investigated recently and three officers have been placed on paid administrative leave, police said. City officials said there were three investigations into the confrontation, adding a criminal investigation through the district attorney and sheriff’s offices, and an independent investigation introduced through the city. with a law firm, Renne Public Law Group.
A city spokesman told BuzzFeed News that the agents were James Fisher, Cameron Leahy and Eric McKinley.
Fisher hired through the city in 2010, while Leahy and McKinley were hired in 2018.
A civilian parking police employee, Charlie Clemmens, was also concerned about the incident, and all four were questioned in the workplace of the district attorney and the sheriff’s department, city officials said in a statement.
Gonzalez’s family circle condemned the officers’ movements and asked for responsibility.
His brother, Gerardo González, called the remedy he saw in the video “unnecessary and unfessional,” saying it was a nonviolent scenario in which police had no explanation for why climb.
“The police killed my brother the same way they killed George Floyd,” he said.
Gerardo said his brother was a “nice and funny man,” a loving father to his 4-year-old son, as well as the father of his mentally disabled brother.
Julia Sherwin, a civil rights lawyer representing the family, told BuzzFeed News that the incident was “extremely disturbing” and asked why the police had stepped it up as it did.
“In America, we don’t kill other people for being in a park, or for being suspected of stealing two bottles of alcohol, or for being unarmed and passively resisting the police,” Sherwin said. “And yet Mario is dead. “