Assisting our client, Arnoldo Casillas, with his latest excessive force case:
“Where’s the Taser? Where’s the pepper spray? Take a step back. Have some reverence for human life,” the family’s attorney, Arnoldo Casillas, told a crowded room of reporters. “There’s no way that this could be justified.”
Relatives of Norma Guzman, who was fatally shot by police on Sept. 27 in downtown Los Angeles held a news conference to call for charges against the officers involved and for changes in the way LAPD officers deal with people with mental illness.
Security footage from a nearby storefront shows two Los Angeles police officers getting out of their black-and-white SUV, their guns drawn as they watch a woman on the sidewalk walk toward them.
One officer stands behind a red car, his gun aimed at the woman. When she reaches the side of the sedan opposite him, the officers open fire. The woman collapses on the ground.
Nearly seven months after Norma Guzman was fatally shot near downtown L.A., her family released footage of the deadly encounter and called for criminal charges against the officers, saying police didn’t do enough to avoid shooting the mentally ill 37-year-old.
The shooting occurred about 10 seconds after the first officer exited the SUV, according to the time-stamped video.
The LAPD has said Guzman was armed with an 8-inch knife and kept moving toward police despite repeated orders to drop the weapon. It is difficult to see Guzman’s hands in the video, which was captured by a nearby security camera and has no sound.
UPDATED September 20, 2016
The police commission faults officers, Samuel Briggs and Antonio McNeely, who fatally shot 37-year-old Norma Angelica Guzman on Sept. 27, saying the officer acted out of department policy.
Briggs and McNeely, who were from the Newton Division were responding to a report of a woman with a butcher knife standing in front of a barber shop. When the officers arrived on scene, they determined that Guzman fit the description. Guzman began advancing toward the officers, going from being 70 feet away from the officers to four feet away within 11 seconds.
The officer closest to Guzman fired one round at her, while the second officer who was further away, seeing that Guzman had gotten close to his partner while holding a knife, fired two rounds at her “to stop the deadly threat.”
Guzman died later at the hospital.
Guzman’s mother, Gloria Gonzalez, was emotional at Wednesday’s news conference, wiping tears from her eyes as she moved in front of the microphones to speak. When she first saw the footage, she said, she didn’t understand why police shot her daughter.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she said in Spanish. “I couldn’t believe they had done this to her.”