Before leaving his mother’s home earlier this month, Derek Diaz turned around and said, “Mom, I love you.”
“That was the last time anyone saw him,” Sonja Nava, the mother of Diaz’s child, told HuffPost.
The next day, July 3, Orlando police officers approached Diaz, 26, while he was sitting inside his parked car. Not even a minute passed before an officer fatally shot Diaz.
Diaz’s family members gathered at his mother’s home to watch the body camera footage of the shooting. His mother, Yaneri Diaz, showed family members all of his old report cards — she had kept all of her son’s things since preschool. She cried in the background before collecting herself and speaking to HuffPost over the phone.
“I am very angry, very upset,” Yaneri Diaz said from the gathering. “I want to see [the officer’s] face and ask him: Why did he do that to him? … I want the officer that killed my son, I want him to pay. I want him to go to jail.”
Derek Diaz’s brother, Jordan Claxton, remembered Diaz as someone who loved playing basketball, getting on TikTok and grabbing a bite to eat with their family. Diaz had gotten his Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning certification last year, and had started a new job a few months later.
Diaz was born in Queens, New York, and lived in New Jersey for a few years. He had been living in Orlando for the last two years, his family said.
Nava said she is worried about how their 5-year-old daughter will grow up now that her father has been killed by police, and she said she hopes there will be accountability for the officer who shot Diaz.
“I think the way the officers handled the situation, they did not handle it the best way they could have,” she said. “It could have been prevented with better police training.”
What Happened During The Shooting
The Orlando Police Department released body camera footage of the fatal encounter Wednesday afternoon following demands from Diaz’s family and national civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing the family.
The footage shows an officer riding his bicycle past several parked cars before approaching Diaz, who was sitting inside one of the vehicles with his window down. The officer shouts at Diaz to turn off his car and music.
“Yes, sir,” replies Diaz, who is holding his cellphone and balls of aluminum foil.
The officer demands Diaz hand him the foil. He replies “My bad” and hands over the foil. The officer then tells Diaz to put his hands on the steering wheel, which he does.
Diaz lifts his hand from the wheel and begins to move it toward a compartment in the vehicle but stops. The officer yells, “Put your hands on the wheel!” while taking a step back and seemingly firing a shot simultaneously.
The officer runs backward from the car, and the body camera shows that another officer is on the scene. The second officer asks if someone had fired their gun. “Yeah, I did,” the first officer replies.
With guns pointed at the car, officers yell at Diaz to show his hands. But as they approach the vehicle, they see Diaz slumped over in the driver’s seat, unresponsive.
Police pull him out of the car and try to administer aid, but Diaz remains unresponsive.
He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Police did not find a weapon on Diaz or in the car.
The Orlando Police Department identified the officer as Jose Velez, who served with the department for three years.
Orlando Police Chief Eric D. Smith said in a news conference officers were patrolling the area to “remove illegal drugs and crime guns off our streets.”
In a statement released with the body-worn camera footage, police said Diaz tossed an object out of the car window that was later discovered to be narcotics. It is not clear from the bodycam footage whether Diaz threw anything from the car.
The police department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for additional comment.
Diaz’s family is now focused on justice. They also said they believe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) should acknowledge the tragedy of their son’s death. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on the shooting.
DeSantis and Monique Worrell, the state attorney in the Orlando area, have been at odds for months, as DeSantis has criticized the prosecutor for not pursuing certain types of crimes such as sex trafficking.
Some believe he’s setting the stage to remove Worrell from office, akin to how he removed former Hillsborough County District Attorney Andrew Warren.
Diaz’s family wants to know if the governor would hold police, specifically the cop who fatally shot Diaz, to the standards he highlights in his political talking points.
“He should, because everyone should be held accountable for every action they make,” Claxton said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what your state of power is — if you do something wrong, you should be held accountable.”