An Alameda County judge tossed involuntary manslaughter charges against two of the three Alameda police officers accused in the 2021 death of Mario Gonzalez, who stopped breathing as officers piled on his back while trying to make an arrest.
The ruling by Judge Scott Patton on Monday to dismiss charges against officers Cameron Leahy and James Fisher marks another twist in a case that drew comparisons to the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin. It comes after the officers’ attorneys argued that Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s office waited too long to file charges against the men, violating the three-year statute of limitations.
A third officer, Eric McKinley, remains charged with involuntary manslaughter after Patton ruled that the district attorney’s office met the timeliness criteria in his case. McKinley spent the first five months of the year a volunteer mission trip in South Africa, causing the statute of limitations in his case to be paused while he traveled out of the state of California.
After the ruling, Fisher’s attorney slammed Price’s office for “shoddy” work, adding that the ruling was vindication “a baseless filing rooted in a lack of prosecutorial integrity.”
“Mr. Fisher is an exemplary officer who fell victim to Pam Price’s desperate attempt to salvage her disastrous time in the DA’s Office,” said the attorney, Julia Fox, in a text message.
A message by this newspaper to the district attorney’s office was not immediately returned.
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.
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 that methamphetamine levels in his body were too low to contribute to his death.
And on April 18 — a day before the three-year anniversary of Gonzalez’s death — Price called a rare after-hours press conference to announce charges against the men. The 11th-hour decision 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 the time.
The officers’ attorneys later argued that Price’s office “rushed” that decision and failed to secure critically needed paperwork in before the state’s three-year deadline for filing involuntary manslaughter charges.
By California law, simply filing charges wasn’t enough to meet that deadline, Patton ruled. Rather, Price and her deputies needed to satisfy a few other requirements — among them, obtaining a judge’s signature on an arrest warrant before the time limit expired.
Instead, the DA’s office only secured “good cause to detain” the men, not arrest them, and filed a notice for the men to appear in court, according to the motion filed by the officers’ attorneys last month.
The DA’s office argued that it routinely followed that procedure — an argument that held little sway with Patton.
“Regardless of whether this procedure had been used in the past, it would not justify its use in the present case if it failed to commence the criminal process and violated the statute of limitations,” the judge wrote.
Check back for updates to this developing story.
Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.
