Young mother shot dead by Long Beach school officer removed from resuscitation system

The family of an 18-year-old mother who remained brain dead after being shot by a Long Beach school security guard said on Friday that she would be removed from the resuscitation system in the coming days and demanded that the officer be criminally charged. in the case.

Mona Rodriguez, the mother of a 5-month-old boy, will likely remain on life support for the next 72 hours while her body is prepared for organ donation, family members and their lawyer said during a press conference outside Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. . The family visited Rodriguez earlier to bid him farewell.

“I raised this little girl,” said Iran Rodriguez, her older brother, who attended the press conference with his brother Oscar. “The officer must be charged.”

Mona Rodriguez was involved in a fight with a 15-year-old girl in a parking lot near Millikan High School on Monday afternoon and then got into a gray sedan with two teenagers, said Arantxa Chavarria, spokesman for the police department of Long Beach. As the sedan sped along with Rodriguez in the passenger seat, the school security guard started shooting.

A video posted to social media appears to show the officer firing at least two shots at the vehicle after it has already passed it. Rodriguez was hit in the back of the neck by one of the shots.

No evidence emerged that anyone involved in the fight was armed, and a friend of the driver said that no one in the car that left attended Millikan High. In the video, screams can be heard from inside the car as passengers inside realize Rodriguez is seriously injured.

Luis Carrillo, the lawyer for the Rodriguez family, appealed to California Atty. General Rob Bonta will open an independent investigation into the shooting. The Long Beach Police Department and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office are conducting their own investigation into the case.

In a letter to the attorney general, Carrillo said Rodriguez did not pose an imminent threat to the officer and that the use of force was unwarranted. He suggested that the officer’s actions “met the threshold of criminal charges,” including murder or manslaughter.

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“This officer had nothing to do with a badge and a gun,” Carrillo said at Friday’s press conference. “She wasn’t an imminent threat when that criminal officer boomed!”

Late Friday, the school district, in response to a request from The Times, identified the officer as Eddie F. Gonzalez. He started with the district on January 10 and has been placed on leave pending the outcome of several inquiries.

According to a Long Beach Unified School Safety Office use of force policy, officers are not permitted to shoot at a moving vehicle. Firearms can only be used when reasonably necessary and justified in the circumstances, such as self-defense and the protection of others, the policy says. The policy also prohibits shooting at fleeing suspects.

Chris Eftychiou, spokesperson for the Long Beach Unified School District, told The Times on Thursday that the school district was “looking carefully at several aspects” while also cooperating with the Long Beach Police Department.

The Times contacted several law enforcement experts who reviewed the videos and they all said, based on current evidence, that the shooting appeared unwarranted. Police departments across the country have sought to restrict shooting at moving vehicles, accounting for 16% of all fatal uses of lethal force by police since 2015.

Seth Stoughton, a former Florida police officer and University of South Carolina law professor who studies police use of force, said most of the law enforcement training today ‘hui strongly discourage officers from shooting at a moving vehicle, which “is very unlikely to actually stop the car and may make the situation worse.”

“Officers can use lethal force when they reasonably believe the subject poses an imminent threat of death or grievous bodily harm,” he said, noting that although the car turned right while the officer stood on the passenger’s side, “the threat was minimal and all he had to do to make it non-existent was to back up slightly.”

By the time the officer started firing, he was already near the back of the car, Stoughton added.

“The car is not a threat, so there is no justification for the use of lethal force here.”

Rodriguez’s partner, Rafeul Chowdhury, 20, said he was driving the car and his 16-year-old brother, Shahriear Chowdhury, was in the back seat when shots were fired.

The officer had threatened to use pepper spray to end the fight between Rodriguez and a girl, who has not been identified, Elder Chowdhury said, but did not indicate he was armed . No one in the car had a gun, he said.

The Long Beach School District employs nine full-time and two part-time security guards, as well as four supervisors. Monday’s incident is the first shooting involving a security guard in the program’s 30 years of existence, Eftychiou said.

A retired Long Beach Unified school safety officer, who asked to remain anonymous, said officers go through a police academy followed by a short probationary period, but their training is “not close” what officers from the Long Beach Police Department and similar agencies receive.

School security officers have been ordered not to engage in issues off campus, he said. They can detain people but cannot make arrests beyond arrests of citizens.

The retired officer, who said he spent more than a dozen years in the same post as the officer involved in Monday’s shooting, said he had studied videos of the shooting from different angles and felt the officer was wrong – both for drawing his gun and for shooting him.

“What this officer did was completely outside of protocol,” he said.

Retired Los Angeles Police Sgt. Cheryl Dorsey watched videos of the shooting on her cell phone and said: “There was no imminent threat to his life as the car raced away from him.”

In a statement, the city of Long Beach called the shooting a “horrific incident” that affected many members of the community. Mayor Robert Garcia said the Twitter that the city was heartbroken because of the events.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help with legal and funeral costs, as well as child custody for Rodriguez and Chowdhury’s 5 month old son.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.