Inquiry Into Fatal Shooting Clears Officer

Ventura County prosecutors Thursday cleared an Oxnard police officer who fatally shot a distraught 23-year-old artist, but also found that the high-profile shooting may have resulted from faulty tactics by officers poorly trained in dealing with the mentally ill.

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury concluded that veteran Oxnard Officer George Tamayo acted in self-defense when he killed Robert Jones Jr. last summer, since the officer feared for his colleagues’ lives when Jones moved toward them from his bedroom closet with a kitchen knife.

“Officer Tamayo honestly and reasonably believed that Mr. Jones was attacking Sgt. [Fred] Sedillos,” Bradbury concluded in a 133-page analysis.

In a separate investigation, the state attorney general’s office reported this week that the Jones shooting “was a justifiable homicide and not a criminal act.”

But Bradbury also suggested that Oxnard police unnecessarily forced the life-and-death confrontation, and that officers could have dealt better with a depressed young man who needed medical treatment and was not a crime suspect.

Jones was killed the morning of Aug. 24 after his mother -- concerned over her son’s threat against her husband the night before and worried that Jones might hurt himself -- called police in the hope that they would take him to a hospital for treatment.

Jones was shot when he refused to drop an 8-inch butcher knife, retreated into a closet, then rose toward officers when they forced him out.

Tamayo shot Jones after a superior’s plan to use a chemical spray to flush Jones out of his closet did not unfold as expected, the report said. “[The] plan seems to assume that Jones would come out of the closet unarmed.”

“We’re not saying that nothing was wrong,” Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Greg Totten said in an interview. “We’re just saying from a purely legal standpoint, Tamayo’s shooting was justified.

“Police officers are trained to take control of a situation,” Totten added. “And that doesn’t always work with the mentally ill.”

In his report, Bradbury cites a separate analysis by consulting psychologist Joel Dvoskin on how police tactics could have contributed to the Jones shooting.

“This does not appear to be a case of intentional police misconduct,” wrote Dvoskin, an expert in dealing with mentally ill crime suspects. “The errors that were made resulted from inadequate information, bad judgment, or inadequate training; more likely, the cause of this tragedy was a combination of all three.”

Dvoskin was particularly critical of supervising officer Sedillos’ decision to use a beanbag shotgun and pepper spray to disarm Jones even though he was not an apparent threat and the use of force likely heightened Jones’ sense of being under attack. The officers were not aware of a warning from Jones’ mother to a police dispatcher that her son disliked and distrusted police.

After sliding open a closet door with a gun barrel, Sedillos shot the crouching Jones with a beanbag for the third time, the report noted. That prompted Jones to rise and Tamayo to shoot Jones with his handgun, striking the man in the chest.

“Sgt. Sedillos erred badly in his decision to fire a ‘beanbag shotgun,’ ” Dvoskin said. And pepper spray “could only be expected to increase the general sense of chaos, panic and fear.”

The preferred strategy with the mentally ill, Dvoskin said, is to slow things down, not to escalate them.

The Bradbury report upset Jones’ family, while police generally saw it as thorough and fair.

“I’m not surprised, I’m disappointed,” said Gabriella Navaro Busch, lawyer for Jones’ mother, Ida Perkins. “The facts, as we see them, are different.”

Based on Bradbury’s history, she said, it was almost a foregone conclusion that he would find the shooting justified.

“This county’s been consistent, so despite the apparent facts in this case, the county still ruled the shooting justified,” Busch said.

“Ida calls the police for help, and the police come and kill her son,” she said. “Why isn’t it shoddy police work?”

Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez said the report contains valuable recommendations on improving officer training. Oxnard has already implemented some of them since the Jones shooting, training 16 officers so far in special 40-hour classes on how to recognize mentally ill people and deal with them.

Additional training of supervising officers will come, Lopez said, and he pledged to work with mental health officials to put mental health workers and officers in the same patrol car.

He would not comment on police tactics, citing two pending federal lawsuits by Jones’ parents. But he defended the actions of his officers.

“You can always look back and say things could have been done better,” he said. “Unfortunately, these officers don’t have that luxury.”

As things were, Bradbury found that Tamayo handled himself well.

Seeking to calm Jones, the officer called him “buddy” and “Rob.” He repeatedly offered to put his badge on the floor if Jones would put his knife on top of it, according to a tape recording of the incident.

“Do you want to go get some help? I’ll go with you. I’ll help you out,” Tamayo said midway through their 20-minute exchange. “Give you a ride up there and talk to somebody. Is that all right? Is that cool? Talk to me, buddy, tell me how you feel.”

At one point Jones said: “What did I do? ... Make me a deal....” At another, he said, “You shouldn’t have to do this.” And as officers backed Jones into a corner, he said: “Everyone knows the consequences, right?” a comment that officers considered a threat.

After reviewing transcripts, officer and witness statements, Dvoskin concluded that Tamayo’s “actions, in every regard, appear to have been beyond reproach.”

At the time, however, the shooting prompted an uproar partly because it was the fifth homicide in the first eight months of 2001 by Oxnard police, more than peace officers in many U.S. states and major American cities kill in an entire year.

The Jones case also fueled claims of racial profiling by Oxnard police, since a spokesman for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People claimed Jones had twice been arrested because of racial bias in the months before his death, and was depressed because of it.

The FBI and the state attorney general’s office conducted civil rights investigations. The federal inquiry is ongoing.

All five of those killed in Oxnard police shootings last year were Latino or black. Police have said four were mentally ill. Bradbury has found each of the shootings justified.

Since 1992, Bradbury has found 30 of 31 fatal police shootings to be justified. In the other case, he found that one Oxnard officer killed another in an accident during a 1996 drug raid.

In Los Angeles County, prosecutors have ruled that the 20 fatal police shootings in 2001 for which investigations have been completed so far were justified. In Orange County, prosecutors have found all five fatal shootings by police last year justified.

Under state law, a police officer may use deadly force when circumstances create a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury in the mind of the officer.