OAKLAND — A jury must now decide whether ex-Antioch police Officer Morteza Amiri gleefully conspired to prey on residents in a racist “blood for blood” campaign across the city he was sworn to protect, or if he is an innocent victim of lying witnesses and “cherrypicked” text messages.
Those vastly different portrayals took center stage Wednesday as jurors began deliberating the fate of Amiri, a former Antioch K9 officer accused of wrongfully releasing his dog on dozens of people and later lying about it in his police reports. Prosecutors say he wasn’t alone, but rather worked with other officers to maim as many people as possible — particularly Black residents — under the guise of being a “proactive” police officer.
The jury’s deliberations cap a rollercoaster of a trial that saw a judge declare a mistrial against Amiri’s co-defendant, fellow ex-Antioch Officer Devon Wenger, just two days into testimony. Left to face trial alone, Amiri watched as several of his former colleagues — including a close friend who agreed to cooperate with prosecutors while facing similar charges — took the stand against him.
For hours on Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Cheng methodically walked jurors through nearly every moment Amiri sicced his police dog, Purcy, on suspects as part of his “trophy” chase. All of it, he said, were signs that the former officer was guilty of conspiracy, depravation of civil rights and falsifying records.
“They planned to hurt people, they encouraged each other to hurt people, and they went out and hurt people when it wasn’t necessary, as their own form of punishment,” Cheng said. “The celebration of injuries and pain showed the motivation and purpose behind these uses of force.”
Cheng pointed to texts where Amiri boasted about his dog ripping a man’s tendons from his limb and going for others’ throats — messages punctuated with racially-charged language that included references to Black residents as “gorillas.” The prosecutor also showed the jury numerous pictures that Amiri texted his fellow officers of bloodied people chewed up by Purcy — pictures that Amiri wanted for “personal stuff,” rather than as evidence.
The attacks happened almost monthly, with three of them coming in one week and two happening in a single day — almost all of them followed by celebratory and boastful texts, according to evidence presented at trial. In one instance, Amiri allegedly joked about having having a “weak ass” reason for using his dog on one man in July 2019, texting someone later that he skewed his report on the incident “so I don’t go to court for the bite.”
In presenting their case, prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of Amiri’s former colleagues. The government’s star witness, Eric Rombough, provided a measured — if devastating — account of how he and Amiri conspired to hunt down Antioch residents and “dehumanize” them. He avoided a similar trial by previously pleading guilty to conspiracy and civil rights violations, describing that decision as a chance to “clear his conscience.”
Another former officer — Timothy Manly Williams, who separately faces charges of warning an Oakland gang member about an ongoing police wiretap — recounted how Amiri let his dog loose on a man while on a ride-along.
“Their approach to policing became corrupt, and they betrayed their oath to defend and uphold the Constitution,” Cheng said. “The conspiracy was criminal. The acts of violence you’ve heard about was criminal. And the coverup and concealment was criminal.”
Amiri’s attorney acknowledged Wednesday that the texts “don’t look good — they don’t look politically correct, and they look unprofessional.” But, he added while looking directly at the jury, they were “cherrypicked and delivered to you, to make Mr. Amiri look bad.”
The attorney pleaded with the jury to “slow down or stop that runaway freight train known as the government.”
“At no time did any supervisor or sergeant intervene, and they’re in on all these text messages,” said the attorney, Paul Goyotte. “Nobody ever reigned anybody in. That’s a culture of that agency. Which, as we talked about, was a product of that city, and a product of that environment they’re in.”
He laid into almost all of the prosecutors’ witnesses, calling Rombough a “bad cop” who had “a major, full-speed-on-steroids motive to throw Mr. Amiri under the bus here.” Manly Williams, he added, was “probably the dumbest witness in this whole trial.”
When referencing multiple men who recounted on the witness stand being bitten by Amiri’s dog, Goyotte repeated the same line: “He lied to you.”
“What the government would have you do is get an impression, a feeling, a vibe,” said Goyette, referencing the voluminous gory pictures and texts highlighted by prosecutors. “But I’m going to ask you to focus on the details, because they’re important.”
Amiri did not take the stand in his own defense.
He’s already is a convicted felon, having been found guilty last year of wire fraud and conspiracy in a separate case involving a group of mostly Pittsburg officers who paid an officer’s wife to take online college classes. The participants plotted to earn educational incentive pay offered to Antioch and Pittsburg employees who received college educations, but without having to do the actual schoolwork, prosecutors alleged.
His current trial marks the latest chapter in a sprawling policing scandal gripping East Contra Costa County, which resulted in state and federal charges against 14 ex-Antioch and Pittsburg cops on a range of alleged crimes, including civil rights violations, steroid distribution, firearms offenses, fraud and bribery. In the process, federal investigators discovered a trove of racist and derogatory texts shared between roughly half of Antioch’s police force.
Among the officers charged was Wenger, who saw U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White declare a mistrial last week after concerns arose about his attorney’s ability to adequately represent him. A new trial date for those charges has yet to be set. Wenger also is slated to face trial next month on steroid distribution charges.
Even after the mistrial, Wenger has remained in the spotlight. In an appearance Tuesday evening on The Police Applicant Podcast, Wenger took jabs at the federal prosecutors who were trying him just days earlier.
His own attorney “was mopping the floor with those nerds, I mean just absolutely destroying them,” Wenger said. He added: “It was very obvious they had no idea what they were doing.”
