(Reuters) – California prosecutors announced manslaughter charges against three police officers in the 2021 death of a man in their custody, reversing the outcome of a previous investigation that cleared the officers.
Officers in Alameda, California, pinned Mario Gonzalez, 26, to the ground for about five minutes before he became unresponsive during an arrest on April 19, 2021, according to body camera footage the city released after his death. .
An attorney for the officers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gonzalez’s death in Alameda, a city of nearly 80,000 people adjacent to Oakland, came a day before a Minneapolis jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of George Floyd’s murder, amid nationwide protests against police violence and racial inequality.
An initial investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office into the case concluded in 2022 that the officers bore no responsibility for Gonzalez’s death.
But the Office of Public Accountability Unit, a new department opened by District Attorney Pamela Price in 2023 after she was elected, reopened and reexamined the case, leading to the charges announced Thursday.
The three officers charged Thursday were sent to a park to check on Gonzalez in 2021 after residents reported a man was loitering and talking to himself, according to recordings of 911 emergency calls released by the city.
The officers’ body camera footage showed that they struggled for just over five minutes to keep Gonzalez pinned down and handcuffed him as they tried to take him into custody.
After Gonzalez became unresponsive, officers used chest compressions until paramedics arrived. Gonzalez died in a hospital that day.
An initial autopsy attributed Gonzalez’s death to the toxic effects of methamphetamine, as well as morbid obesity, alcoholism, and the “physiological stress of altercation and restraint.”
A second autopsy, cited by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Thursday’s announcement of the new charges against the officers, described their death as “the result of asphyxia due to restraint.”
(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
