SAN FRANCISCO — Police in Alameda, California, are under fire over the death of a Hispanic man who was pinned to the ground for more than five minutes in a video-recorded arrest that unfolded the same day a jury in Minneapolis began deliberating in the George Floyd case.
Autopsy findings on the cause of death have not been released, but the family of 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez blamed police, accusing them on Tuesday of using excessive force and escalating what should have been a minor encounter with the unarmed man.
Gonzalez stopped breathing following a scuffle with police April 19 at a park, where officers had confronted him after receiving 911 calls that said he appeared disoriented or drunk. The initial police statement said Gonzalez had a medical emergency after officers tried to handcuff him.
“The video showed that he died on the ground with his face on the floor with officers on top of him. That’s what happened. He did not die at the hospital due to medical complications," said his brother, Jerry Gonzalez.
Multiple use-of-force training experts who viewed the video at the request of The Associated Press agreed that the officers shouldn’t have escalated the confrontation, but said their fatal mistake was not immediately taking action once Gonzalez had trouble breathing.
“He wasn’t resisting; he was just trying to breathe," said Timothy T. Williams Jr., an expert who spent nearly 30 years with the Los Angeles Police Department.
In a statement, the San Francisco Bay Area city said it is "committed to full transparency and accountability in the aftermath of Mr. Gonzalez’s death.”
The death is under investigation by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office and a former San Francisco city attorney hired by Alameda to lead an independent probe. The three officers involved in the arrest have been placed on paid leave.
Officer James Fisher has been with the Alameda Police Department since 2010, while the others, Cameron Leahy and Eric McKinley, joined in 2018, the city said.
The arrest took place just hours before the case against former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin went to the jury. The next day, Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter for pinning Floyd to the pavement with his knee on the Black man’s neck in a case that was likewise documented on video and touched off a national reckoning over racism and police brutality.
In Alameda, the nearly hour-long video from two officers' body cameras released late Tuesday shows police talking to a seemingly dazed Gonzalez, who struggles to answer questions. The third officer arrives later.
WARNING: This video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion advised.
When Gonzalez doesn't produce any identification, the officers are seen on video trying to force his hands behind his back to handcuff him, but he resists and they take him to the ground. They repeatedly ask him for his full name and birthdate.
"We’re going to take care of you, OK. We’re going to take care of you,” one officer says on the video.
“I think you just had too much to drink today, OK? That’s all,” the officer says. Later, he adds, “Mario, just please stop fighting us.”
Gonzalez, who weighed about 250 pounds (113 kilograms), is seen grunting and shouting as he lies face down on wood chips while the officers restrain him. One officer puts an elbow on his neck and a knee on his shoulder.
“He’s lifting my whole body weight up,” an officer says at one point.
One officer also appears to put a knee on his back and leaves it there for about four minutes as Gonzalez gasps for air, saying, “I didn't do nothing, OK?"
Gonzalez’s protests appear to weaken, and after about five minutes he seems to lose consciousness.
Shortly before he stops breathing, one officer asks the other: “Think we can roll him on his side?”
The other answers, “I don’t want to lose what I got, man.”
The video shows officers rolling Gonzalez over and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They are also seen administering at least two doses of Narcan, which is given to counteract opiate overdoses. Gonzalez was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Police also made public two calls dispatchers received about Gonzalez that prompted them to send officers to the park, which sits at the end of a cul-de-sac of well-kept homes with manicured gardens. One caller said Gonzalez was “kind of talking to himself” and “not making any sense”
The caller added: “I mean, he’s not doing anything wrong, he’s just scaring my wife."
A second man told a dispatcher that Gonzalez had two drugstore baskets with alcohol bottles and that it appeared he was breaking the security tags off them.
Gonzalez had a 4-year-old son, also named Mario, and was the main caretaker of his 22-year-old brother, who has autism, his family said. On a GoFundMe page set up for the family, they wrote, “Mario was healthy and suffered no medical conditions."
“This would have felt like torture to Mario, and it would feel like drowning on dry land for him, so he had horrific suffering in the minutes before his death," said the family's attorney, Julia Sherwin.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and professor of police studies at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that as in the incident that led to Floyd's death, “what's at stake is so small."
Officials nationwide are reassessing whether counselors rather than police should deal with people who are intoxicated or suffering a mental health crisis. O'Donnell said the Alameda case was an instance in which police "have to take care of these issues that should not be their issues."
Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police use of force, said officers should have rolled Gonzalez over as soon as they could. Keeping him on his stomach was “probably the worst thing that could have happened," Alpert said.
“Once they’re controlling him, as we learned from the Floyd trial with all those medical experts, this position or compression is deadly,” he said.
He added: “Obviously he’s in some sort of mental crisis, and what’s the goal? What are they trying to do with him? Was he a danger?”
