Officers Cleared in Death Involving Toy Gun

A jury took less than four hours Wednesday to clear two Garden Grove police officers in a $5-million wrongful death suit brought by the parents of a man who was shot to death after pulling a toy pistol.

In unanimous verdicts, which also cleared the city of Garden Grove, jurors found that Mark Van Holt, 29, and Roger Keyes, 38, did not act improperly in January, 1989, when they shot Dennis Paul Gonzales in a friend’s living room.

Van Holt, who is now a member of the Los Alamitos Police Department, is also a defendant in a $20-million lawsuit involving the Jan. 23, 1993, shooting death of a 40-year-old truck driver and former Marine.

Van Holt said he felt “vindicated” by the verdict. And Keyes said he was “ecstatic. It says a lot for our justice system and how the truth comes out.”

Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom thanked the jurors for deciding a case he said was “a terrible tragedy, no doubt about it.”

Without commenting on the verdict, Beacom said he hoped that it would offer “closure” to Gonzales’ father, Dennis A. Gonzales.

But Gonzales insisted that his son was “not at fault” in the incident.

“He had to be insane or suicidal” to have done what the officers alleged, Gonzales said, “and he was neither.”

Jury foreman Kim M. Cherry, 31, of Anaheim said she and others on the panel felt that Gonzales had brought on the situation by pulling and pointing a realistic-looking, toy .45-caliber pistol at the officers, who were responding to a report of a domestic dispute. The officers, she said, were forced to make a split-second decision after warning Gonzales.

Other jurors told attorneys for both sides that their verdict was not affected by the fatal shooting of a Garden Grove police officer Tuesday.