Mother Dies After Losing Suit in Son’s Slaying

Those who knew Dolores Gonzales say she was a doting mother who lived for her son, Dennis. After he was killed in 1989 by two Garden Grove police officers, she focused her grief on a civil suit that claimed police used excessive force when they shot her son.

Just hours after a Santa Ana Superior Court jury ruled Wednesday that the shooting of her son was justified, Dolores Gonzales died.

Attorney Kurt Kupferman, who represented the 50-year-old woman in her family’s $5-million suit against the two Garden Grove police officers, said he believes that she died of a broken heart.

Kupferman said relatives told Gonzales of the jury’s verdict. She died in her sleep about 4 a.m. Thursday.

“She was an invalid, but this whole case put a lot of stress on her,” Kupferman said of Gonzales, who suffered from severe arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair. “She lived for her son. I think this whole thing just broke her heart. Her son was everything to her.”

Jurors concluded that Officers Mark Van Holt, 29, and Roger Keyes, 38, acted in self-defense in January, 1989, when they fired on Dennis Gonzales after he pulled a realistic-looking toy gun from his waistband. Jurors said Dennis Gonzales was responsible for his own fatal injuries.

The officers were responding to a report that Dennis Gonzales had beaten up his girlfriend while at a friend’s house. Police said Gonzalez reached for what appeared to be a weapon after refusing to follow their commands to halt and raise his hands. Officials also said that he had earlier used the fake gun to rob a supermarket.

But relatives of the slain man protested that Dennis Gonzales would have had to be “insane or suicidal” to pull a weapon on police and insisted that he was wrongly slain.

Relatives could not be reached for comment on his mother’s death.