A federal lawsuit alleges Pleasanton police officers botched an incident with a domestic violence suspect last year, fatally shooting him in the head after he walked out of an apartment building carrying a kitchen knife.
The man, 33-year-old Cody Chavez of San Jose, dropped the knife after police hit him with bean bags and less-lethal peller rounds, but was then immediately struck multiple times by deadly gunfire, said Ben Nisenbaum, a civil rights attorney and partner at the Oakland firm Burris Nisenbaum Curry & Lacy.
“It’s almost simultaneous, but the less lethal is first,” said Nisenbaum, who is representing Chavez’s family. “Then people start shooting their lethal guns, so they don’t give any chance for the less lethal to work. So why even have this plan? Why even bother?”
The officers who shot him were cleared last year of any criminal wrongdoing in the Feb. 17, 2002, confrontation by former Alameda County District attorney Nancy O’Malley. But after O’Malley announced her plans to retire before last November’s election, Pamela Price made an issue of the shooting during her campaign to replace O’Malley, calling for an independent investigation.
After her victory, Price quickly reopened the case — along with five other fatal police shootings —announcing in January that she would review whether any criminal charges should be filed against the shooting officers, Brian Jewell and Mario Guillermo.
In a report dated December 2022, O’Malley said that the officers were justified in believing Chavez posed a significant threat of death or severe injury to others. But Price said in a January press release that the report was one of several O’Malley’s administration completed “at the 11th hour.”
“As the top prosecutor, I want to give each case a thorough review to ensure justice has not been forgotten,” Price said at the time. “I’ve made sure that my office has attempted to reach out to each of the families of the deceased. The healing process cannot begin until we do our due diligence.”
More than six months later, it’s unclear where Price’s review of the Chavez case — which was placed under the purview of her office’s Public Accountability Unit — stands. A spokesperson for Price’s office did not return phone and email messages seeking comment.
The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in September on behalf of Chavez’s teenage daughter in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and is in its early stages, Nisenbaum said, adding that he hasn’t yet taken officer depositions.
The civil lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleges officers did not “properly” try to de-escalate the hourslong standoff with Chavez — who was suffering from an apparent mental health episode — or reposition themselves to provide more time and space for less-lethal options to work. Multiple officers had staged outside the front door of the bottom-floor apartment that Chavez came out of, finding themselves within feet of each other when Chavez walked outside.
“Part of being a reasonable police officer is taking into consideration the fact that you’re dealing with a person who has a mental health crisis,” Nisenbaum said. “You don’t have to have a shooting. It can be dealt with many different ways, and you have the means and tools to do that.”
“We’re in a different place than we were in the 1980s and the 1970s,” he added. “Dirty Harry is not running around with the big old Magnum .44 and just killing criminals. That’s not how policing works, if it ever worked that way.”
Heather Tiernen, a spokesperson for the city of Pleasanton, declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing the city’s practice of not discussing ongoing litigation. Attorneys for the city denied the accusations in court papers, saying video footage shows officers opening fire on Chavez after he began to run toward officers with a knife after less-lethal weapons failed.
PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 17: Police examine the scene where police shot and killed a suspect carrying a knife after responding to a domestic-violence call in Pleasanton, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group)
Officers were sent to the apartment complex after an ex-girlfriend called 911 to report violence and threats of violence allegedly carried out by Chavez, who was alone in the apartment when police arrived, according to court documents filed by the city. Chavez, the documents said, refused to leave the apartment and continually hung up on crisis negotiators who tried to talk to him by phone during the standoff.
A jury trial has been scheduled for November 2024.
Rocio Santillan, who is pursuing the wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of her and Chavez’s 13-year-old daughter, said she has not heard from Price’s office. Chavez’s aunt, Margaret O’Neal, said she received a message from the District attorney’s Office around the same time she was preparing for an interview with this newspaper.
Still, Chavez’s brother, Anthony Chavez, offered thanks to Price for reopening the criminal investigation into the shooting. He called former DA O’Malley’s exoneration of the shooting officers the second worst day of his life in the past two years — the first being the death of his brother.
“My stomach, it dropped out of my hip,” said Anthony Chavez, speaking by phone from Mule Creek State Prison in Ione where he is incarcerated. “You took my brother, and then you got a high-five around and said, ‘Good job; job well done.’ For who? That little girl who’s not going to have her dad?”
Family members lamented Cody Chavez’s death as an example of multiple systems — from education to medical to criminal justice — failing a person who could not afford to get the help he needed. Cody Chavez, they said, was likely suffering from an undiagnosed mental disorder given his family history of mental illness. And he had an anger problem that did not mix well with alcohol.
In 2021, Cody Chavez was convicted of assaulting a Jamaican man in a case that was investigated by Santa Cruz police as a hate crime. He ultimately pleaded guilty to assault with great bodily injury, avoiding other charges and a hate crime enhancement, according to this newspaper.
Santillan said her former boyfriend was not racist. “He had friends who were white, Black, Asian, rich, poor. He had friends in the police department,” she said.
“They called him ‘Goofy’ because that’s who he was,” Santillan said. “He was crazy. He was funny. He was the life of the party. And you would have to know him to understand why he does the things he did.”
A framed photograph of Cody Chavez, a San Jose man killed by Pleasanton police last year, rests on the mantel of his aunt Margaret O’Neal at her home in San Jose, Calif., Friday Aug. 4, 2023. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
In a letter Cody Chavez wrote to his daughter in June 2021, he apologized for not meeting the expectations he had for himself as a father. He said he missed playing “American Ninja Warrior” with her at the playground. And he said he was doing the work needed to “become a better person and a better father.”
“It is going to take some time and a lot of hard work, but that is OK, I’ll do whatever it takes to be able to see you again. We’ll talk soon. … Love, Dad,” he wrote.
Nestled on a couch between her mother and her great-aunt on a recent afternoon in San Jose, Cody Chavez’s daughter, Alina, said through tears that she missed her dad.
“I will never forget the time that, you know, we went to Chuck E. Cheese,” she said. “He took me to Golfland and Rockin’ Jump. He would take me to this one place and it had a lot of fish. And we would just look at it. I’ll never forget those memories.”
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