OAKLAND — Nearly three years to the day after Mario Gonzalez died gasping for air beneath the weight of three Alameda policemen, District Attorney Pamela Price called a rare after-hours press conference to announce bombshell manslaughter charges against those officers.
It was a last-minute decision that may have imperiled her case from the very start, a new court filing claims.
Attorneys for the three police officers say Price’s office violated the statute of limitations when her prosecutors charged each of the men with involuntary manslaughter on April 18, a day before the anniversary of Gonzalez’s 2021 death. On Friday, the officers’ attorneys plan to argue in court for the case to be tossed — alleging county prosecutors “rushed” the case and failed to secure critically needed paperwork in a scramble to beat that key deadline.
“The DA’s office thinks everybody but them needs to follow the rules,” said Alison Berry Wilkinson, an attorney for one of the officers.
For Gonzalez’s mother, Edith Arenales, the prospect of watching the case get dismissed over a procedural issue has left her “heartbroken and outraged.”
“There is something deeply flawed with the system if it values procedures over human life,” Arenales said. Dismissing the case, she added, would be “a blow to community trust in the system.”
“One-hundred percent, I’m worried,” she added.
The allegation marks another twist in a case that drew comparisons to the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin.
Gonzalez, 26, died after being contacted by Alameda officers who suspected he had broken a municipal code banning open alcohol containers in public. Officers tackled Gonzalez when he resisted being handcuffed, according to police video, and pinned him to the ground for several minutes as he screamed and whimpered before falling unconscious.
The Alameda County Coroner’s Office later ruled that his death was a homicide, citing “stress of altercation and restraint,” while also noting the “toxic effects of methamphetamine,” “morbid obesity” and “alcoholism” as contributing factors.
Edith Arenales, mother of Mario Gonzalez, speaks to the media during a vigil for her son Mario Gonzalez in Alameda, Calif., on Friday, April 19, 2024. Standing to the right of Arenales is her other son Gerardo Gonzalez. Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price’s Police Accountability Unit announced that her office will file manslaughter charges against the three officers, Eric McKinley, James Fisher, and Cameron Leahy, who suffocated Mario Gonzalez to death while in their custody on April 19, 2021. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
A few months later, former Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley cleared the officers — Eric McKinley, Cameron Leahy and James Fisher — of criminal wrongdoing, suggesting their response was “objectively reasonable.”
However, an independent autopsy requested by Gonzalez’s family determined the primary cause of death was “restraint asphyxiation.” It also found methamphetamine levels in his body were too low to contribute to his death.
From the opening weeks of Price’s tenure in 2023, the first-term district attorney vowed to re-evaluate the case.
The subsequent decision by her office to prosecute the officers came down to “trying to rebuild trust in a system that has not always been fair to folks, particularly in Alameda County,” Price said at her mid-April press conference.
At issue now is how Price’s office went about charging the three men.
A deputy district attorney in Price’s Public Accountability Unit, Leah Abraham, filed a single count of involuntary manslaughter against each officer the afternoon of April 18.
Yet attorneys for the officers say simply filing the charges wasn’t enough to meet that deadline. Rather, Price and her deputies needed to satisfy a few other requirements — namely, getting a judge to sign off on an arrest warrant.
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Instead, the DA’s office only secured “good cause to detain” the men, not arrest them, according to the motion filed by the officers’ attorneys.
The claim sheds fresh light on a curious request made by a county prosecutor during the officers’ arraignment in early August. At that hearing, prosecutor Alexis Feigen Fasteau asked Alameda County Superior Court Judge Elena Condes to sign off on a declaration that would have addressed the issue, the officers’ attorneys say. Condes, however, refused to consider the request.
Price’s office has since claimed that it did nothing wrong — suggesting instead that the officers’ attorneys fixed any possible procedural issues themselves by acknowledging the charges and sending their officers to the early August arraignment hearing.
McKinley’s case may be particularly nuanced, given that he was out of the country on a mission trip in South Africa when the charges were filed. As a result, the DA’s office claimed his statute of limitations expired no earlier than Aug. 7, because the countdown was placed on hold while he lived outside of California.
When Abraham filed charges in April, Condes specifically offered to sign an arrest warrant for the prosecutor, Price’s office added in a recent court filing. But Abraham declined the invitation, and instead only sought “notice to appear” letters “as a courtesy” to the officers, the filing said.
“The procedure followed here was reflective of both the courtesy offered to Defendants in lieu of issuing warrants for their arrest, as well as the routine and historical procedure followed by the District Attorney’s Office” and the county court system, the filing said. The word “detain” exists on boilerplate paperwork often used by the office, it added.
Overall, the DA’s office appears to be suggesting that the whole issue comes down to “semantics,” said Steven Clark, a former Santa Clara prosecutor and legal analyst. Still, he voiced amazement that Price’s office would even gamble with such an important deadline, particularly considering that Gonzalez died years ago.
Not making sure the paperwork is filed in time is “kind of like checking your gas gauge as a pilot before you get in the airplane — it’s something you just do not want to have a problem with,” Clark said.
