Officials said Tuesday that a former California school safety officer who shot and killed an 18-year-old woman as she tried to leave a fight has pleaded not guilty to voluntary manslaughter, almost three years after being charged with murder for the crime.
Eddie Gonzalez is set to be sentenced on October 8. A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Pamela J. Johnson, told CNN that Gonzalez could face three to six years in jail.
The plea comes about four months after Gonzalez’s murder trial was thrown out because the jury could not agree on a decision.
Gonzalez was walking around near Long Beach’s Millikan High School on September 27, 2021, when he saw Manuela Rodriguez, 18, and a girl, 15, fighting, according to the cops. Police say the school safety officer fired his handgun at the sedan as Rodriguez and two others tried to get away in a nearby car. Rodriguez was hit while sitting in the front passenger seat.
The LA County District Attorney’s office said Rodriguez was taken to the hospital but died from her injuries about a week later. She left behind a son who is 5 months old.
Gonzalez was fired soon after for breaking the district’s use-of-force policy. The policy says that safety officers should not shoot at a fleeing person, a moving vehicle, or a window of a moving vehicle unless “clearly warrant the use of a firearm as a final means of defense.” After one month, he was charged with murder.
The charge was made by Gascon. “We must hold accountable the people we have put in positions of trust to protect us.” “That’s especially true for the armed people we’ve always trusted to watch over our kids on their way to and from school and while they’re there.”
In their civil case against the Long Beach Unified School District, Rodriguez’s family made a $13 million settlement last year. They said the deal was not an “admission of liability” from the Long Beach Unified School District.
“I don’t know what to do or how to move on without my dear daughter.” “She was very important to me,” her mother Manuela Sahagun said at the time. “All I want is fair treatment for my daughter.”
Seven of the jurors wanted to find Gonzalez guilty of murder in April, while five wanted to find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which is a lower charge. This was reported by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office to CNN.
The case against Gonzalez comes at a time when US schooltowns are debating whether or not armed police officers should be in schools. Some people say that having police around helps protect students from gun violence, but others are worried about police misconduct and the speeding up of the process of sending kids from school to jail.
In an effort to stop school shootings in California, a bill that was introduced earlier this year but did not pass would have forced all K–12 schools in the state to have at least one armed officer. At the moment, California law lets school districts choose whether to hire or contract with armed police officers or disarmed security officers.
Some people have also started campaigns in California school districts to get rid of school police, who they say are more likely to target Black and Latino kids.
In 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union of California put out a report saying that adding more police to public schools might be bad for the kids. Latino students were arrested 6.9 times more often and Black students were arrested 7.4 times more often in schools with police officers than in schools without police officers. It also found that the groups were more likely to be told to call the police.
In a study released in July by the National Center for Education Statistics, it was found that about 45% of US public schools had sworn police officers who regularly carried a gun.
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