D.A. moves to drop charges against Torrance officers in fatal shooting of Black man

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman moved to drop manslaughter charges Friday against two Torrance police officers who shot and killed a Black man in 2018, attempting to end a seven-year saga that saw the case rejected and then reexamined by three different elected prosecutors.

Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 for the shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a 23-year-old car theft suspect who was in possession of an air rifle at the time he was killed. While Mitchell never pointed the weapon at either officer, Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed was a real firearm when he opened fire.

Michael Gennaco, a special prosecutor hired earlier this year by Hochman to review the case, filed a motion to dismiss charges late Thursday, saying he did not believe prosecutors could prove voluntary manslaughter at trial.

But Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta declined to rule on the motion Friday, citing a pending review of the case by the California Supreme Court. Concannon’s attorneys had previously filed a writ of habeas corpus after Ohta rejected a motion to dismiss the charges.

“I am not going to rule on this because it would be inappropriate for me to do that at this point. The Supreme Court has to tell us its decision,” Ohta said.

Ohta signaled he wouldn’t decide the motion until the case was withdrawn from the Supreme Court, and even then, he would need time to review the filings.

Chavez and Concannon were among those investigated in 2021 when the district attorney’s office uncovered a thread of racist text messages sent by members of the Torrance Police Department.

In a 26-page memo made public as part of the motion to dismiss, Gennaco determined that Chavez sent three “problematic” messages as part of the scandal, including a racial slur against Black people and comments that were derogatory toward Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Concannon did not send any racist messages and at times even “muted” the threads containing offensive commentary, according to the motion. Evidence related to the scandal would have been minimally relevant at any trial, Gennaco concluded.

“Mr. Hochman should be commended for his principled stand and his effort to do the right thing,” Concannon’s attorneys Lisa Houle and Matthew Murphy said in a statement. “The only new evidence that has come to light is an enhanced video showing the decedent reaching for the gun in his lap, another showing a little girl who had been placed in danger by the actions of the decedent, and equivocal evidence to show that Matt Concannon never sent a racist text or made any disparaging comments about anyone.”

The shooting incident occurred when officers approached Mitchell while he was seated in the purported stolen car in a Ralphs parking lot. They said they spotted what was later revealed to be a “break barrel air rifle” between his legs.

Gennaco said the stock of the air rifle, which was all Concannon could see, looked “strikingly similar” to a shotgun. He fired one round, and Chavez fired twice immediately after. The two officers then retreated and waited for backup.

Nearly 30 minutes elapsed before anyone checked on Mitchell, who was then pronounced dead of a single gunshot wound, according to court records.

“These are difficult cases. The fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean we won’t bring them when they are appropriate,” Hochman said. “I’d say we probably spent hundreds of hours on the 12 seconds that were involved in the case.”

Concannon and Chavez were initially cleared of all wrongdoing by then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey. But when George Gascón swept into office on a police accountability platform and ousted Lacey in 2020, he hired a special prosecutor to reexamine several cases Lacey declined to pursue, including Mitchell’s death.

But Lawrence Middleton, the special prosecutor brought on by Gascón, did not obtain an indictment in the case until 2023, more than two years after he had been hired to reconsider charges in shootings by police.

The statute of limitations for involuntary manslaughter, an easier case to prove than the voluntary manslaughter charges that Middleton brought, expired in late 2021. Concerns about the timeline Middleton would face to pursue the cases Gascón targeted were raised almost immediately after he joined the D.A.’s office.

Middleton appeared in the courtroom Friday morning and sat beside Mitchell’s mother and a number of activists who have long monitored the trial. Middleton and Gascón declined to comment.

“D.A. Hochman is doing the bidding of the police associations who bankrolled his campaign by attempting to dismiss the charges against Torrance police Anthony Chavez and Matthew Concannon, who killed Christopher Deandre Mitchell,” said Sheila Bates, an organizer with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles. “Since Judge Ohta has withheld his ruling on the dismissal while the case sits at the California Supreme Court, we hold out hope for some semblance of justice.”

Hochman said he met with Mitchell’s mother earlier in the week to explain the decision and described it as a hard conversation. He said she “expressed what you would expect a mother in such a situation to express.”

“These are the most difficult cases that come before a district attorney and his whole team to evaluate,” he said.

Middleton previously argued the officers “created the jeopardy that led to the shooting,” by needlessly confronting Mitchell when he was not a threat and had no means of escaping since his car was parked facing a wall, according to grand jury transcripts. But Ohta disallowed that evidence after a hearing in late 2023. The shooting happened in 2018, two years before a change in California law modified the threshold by which fatal uses of force are judged.

“The judge has essentially kept out the central piece of Mr. Middleton’s evidence,” Hochman said Friday.

Hochman fired Middleton shortly after ousting Gascón in the 2024 election, a move which drew praise from one of Concannon’s attorneys at the time. Gennaco was hired a short time later.

In an interview, Hochman said that while he did not believe the officers were “innocent” he also did not think prosecutors could meet the legal bar needed to prove voluntary manslaughter. He questioned the way Gascón “politicized” the case, noting he promised to reopen the shooting as a candidate without ever reviewing evidence in the matter.

In the motion to dismiss, Genacco warned “defendants will argue that the return of the indictment was foreordained by the public statements that candidate Gascón had issued about the case.”

Gennaco wrote that Middleton committed a number of errors before the grand jury, including failing to present relevant exculpatory evidence and improperly instructing the panel on the elements of the crime of voluntary manslaughter.

Hochman would not say directly if he believed the officers should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

“What we’re saying is this would have been a potential charge for the grand jury to consider. I can’t tell you how the grand jury would have come out on it,” he told The Times.

Chavez is no longer employed by the Torrance Police Department. Concannon remains on administrative leave. An agency spokesman declined to comment.

In the 2021 scandal, The Times uncovered messages that were replete with racial slurs and descriptions of violence against Black men and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

In one string of messages, officers used the N-word to describe Mitchell’s relatives and joked about what would happen after Concannon and Chavez’s names were made public. In the motion, Gennaco spelled out some of the troubling messages that Chavez sent.

“Gun cleaning party at my house when they release my name??” he asked.

“Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another officer replied, according to redacted court filings The Times reviewed in 2022.

Concannon and Chavez are the last officers connected to the scandal with pending cases.

Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic — whose criminal case led to the exposure of the scandal — struck a plea deal earlier this year to vandalism charges for spray painting a swastika on a car towed from a crime scene.

David Chandler, another officer investigated as part of the scandal, pleaded no contest earlier this month to assault charges for shooting a Black suspect in the back. Chandler will eventually see his case dismissed under the terms of the agreement. The Times never saw evidence that Chandler sent racist messages.

All three officers had to give up their rights to be peace officers in California under the terms of their plea deals.

The Torrance Police Department and the California attorney general’s office entered into an “enforceable” agreement to reform earlier this year.