Another killing in the hands of the police

Mario Gonzales, a 26 year old man who died on April 19th after officers handcuffed him and pinned him to the grounds for more than five minutes which resulted in his death.

The reason this has become relevant again is because The Northern California Police department released the bodycam footage just yesterday in which we can see officers talking calmly to Gonzalez in a park in Alameda, California who was clearly disoriented and possibly under the influence

After the officers arrived at the scene after receiving multiple 911 calls they started to make questions to Gonzales who seemed dazed and struggled to answer the questions the officers made. He also didn’t have any identification with him, which made it even harder for the officers in duty, they repeatedly asked Gonzakez for his full name and birthdate but he wasn’t cooperating with the police officers. After this, they tried to handcuff him but he started resisting as soon as the officers took the handcuffs near him so they had to take him to the ground to be able to do so.

He kept struggling even after the officers had him on the ground. One of the officers had his knee on his shoulder and was trying to calm Mr. Gonzalez by telling him: “Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you”. But Gonzalez, who weighed more than 100 kilograms kept shouting and grunting as he laid face to the ground on some wood chips while the officers were trying to restrain him. 

They calmly kept asking him to stop fighting them on multiple occasions but he didn’t seem to want to cooperate with them. One of the officers apear to keep his knee on his back and left it there for about four minutes, as Gonzalez kept protesting for the whole duration of that time. And after five minutes he seemed to start losing consciousness as his whining started to become weaker.

Sadly, after a few more minutes he became unresponsive and the officers quickly rolled him over and began to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but he was pronounced dead later that evening at the hospital.  

Gonzalez left behind his 4 year old son and he was also the main caretaker of his brother who has autism. This was a very unfortunate series of events who led to the death of a human being, and once more by the hands of police officers. The family members of Gonzales blame the police for his death saying that the officers did wrong on trying to handcuff him and pin him to the ground, and that it should have been a minor encounter with an inoffensive and unarmed man. 

What is more frustrating is that this event could have been prevented very easily, nobody should have died that evening. But the officers really did nothing wrong and their body cam footage revealed that they never did anything that put Mario’s life at risk. We still need to wait for the autopsy results to finally know what caused his death. But until now with the evidence that we have, it seems like the police didn’t cause his death intentionally.