Case against Alameda police officer in Mario Gonzalez custody death dismissed
The Alameda County District Attorney's Office on Friday announced the sole police officer still facing a charge in the death of Mario Gonzalez while he was being taken into custody in 2021 in Alameda has had the case dismissed.
The office issued a press release Friday morning stating that the involuntary manslaughter charge against Alameda police officer Eric McKinley was dropped due to inconsistent statements made by forensic pathology expert Dr. Bennett Omalu.
McKinley was one of the three officers present during the incident on April 19, 2021, that led to Gonzalez's death. Police responded to calls regarding a man acting oddly near a park. McKinley and fellow Alameda police officers James Fisher and Cameron Leahy found the 26-year-old Gonzalez and detained him.
The unarmed Gonzalez was pinned to the ground by the officers and their body camera footage showed at least one officer pressing his elbow and knee into Gonzalez's back and shoulders as he cried out for help. The officer continued to pin Gonzalez to the ground until he went limp and died.
The incident gained national attention in the wake of similar custody deaths including the murder of George Floyd. A coroner's report attributed the cause of death to a combination of drugs along with the stress of the altercation with officers.
A year after the death, then-District Attorney Nancy O'Malley announced she would not prosecute the officers after her office determined the officers acted reasonably in detaining and arresting Gonzalez and were "not criminally liable."
However, after Pamela Price was elected Alameda County DA, she announced earlier this year that her office would charge the officers with involuntary manslaughter.
In October, a judge dismissed the charges against Fisher and Leahy because of the statute of limitations, with the judge citing what he called "the rushed and careless work by the District Attorney's office in filing this complaint." McKinley was still facing the involuntary manslaughter charge in Gonzalez's death until the charge was dismissed Friday.
The Alameda County District Attorney's Office said Dr. Omalu was the forensic pathology expert who testified in the civil case filed by the family of Mario Gonzalez on behalf of his son against the city of Alameda, the Alameda Police Department, and the three officers.
Omalu performed a second autopsy on Gonzalez for the civil case and said that the cause of death was "restraint asphyxiation." Alameda would later settle the civil suit, paying $11 million to the estate of Gonzalez's son and an additional $350,000 to Gonzalez's mother.
In Friday's release, prosecutors said Omalu "recently filed a Motion to Quash the People's subpoena compelling him to appear in court to testify in the criminal case." In that motion, Omalu "wrote and signed a declaration under penalty of perjury that was inconsistent with his sworn deposition in the civil case."
"Although Dr. Omalu did not change his ultimate opinion on the cause of death, multiple key inconsistencies by this now hostile yet necessary witness led the People to conclude they could not meet their burden of proving Officer McKinley committed involuntary manslaughter beyond a reasonable doubt," the statement issued by the Alameda County District Attorney said.
The dismissal of the charge against McKinley comes a month after Price conceded defeat in November's recall election. Her interim replacement, chief assistant Royl Roberts, stepped in on Dec. 6 after the recall result was certified by the county.
