City to Pay $150,000 to Kin of Man Police Shot

The Santa Ana City Council agreed Monday to pay $150,000 to the family of a robbery suspect who was fatally shot in the back by a Santa Ana police officer last year.

The council voted 6 to 1 in a closed session to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of Ernest Henry Nunez. Nunez took a single shotgun blast to the back on Sept. 20, 1989, after he ignored a police officer’s order to stop running, police said. Nunez, 31, died five hours later.

His three children, who range from 10 to 13 years old, witnessed the shooting. Nunez was not carrying a weapon, police said. The district attorney’s office ruled in February that there had been no criminal wrongdoing by police in the case.

Mayor Daniel H. Young said the city decided to settle the suit to avoid a trial and also the possibility that more would be owed to the family.

“We wanted to protect the police officer from the agony of a trial,” Young said.

Councilman Richards L. Norton said he voted against the settlement because he thought the amount was too much. Norton said that an internal police investigation showed that the officer had fired at Nunez because he thought the man was armed.

Santa Ana police said Nunez had five drug and burglary convictions in Orange County dating to 1977.

“The city attorney said he (Nunez) was a drug addict and was arrested several times,” Norton said. “He was less than a successful member of society. I don’t want to pay out good, hard-earned taxpayers’ dollars like this.”

Nunez was suspected of robbing a clothing store in Orange, where his wife, Rosie, worked, two weeks before the shooting. There, according to police, he tied up his wife after she refused to give him money to buy drugs and fled with about $3,000 from the cash register.

Police then placed the Nunez house in Orange under surveillance shortly after the robbery. The night of the shooting, police were following Nunez, who was in the family car as it traveled into Santa Ana. When Nunez realized that he was being trailed, police said, he tried to flee and was shot.

Rosie Nunez filed the suit against the Santa Ana police last year. In the suit, she asked for more than $400,000 in damages.

In an interview Monday night, Nunez said the money that she will receive in the settlement. will pay for her children’s education.

“The money is not going to bring him back, and it’s not going to compensate us much after all we have been through,” Rosie Nunez said. “But it’s enough right now to get back on our feet.”