Nearly eight months after 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez died at the hands of police in Alameda, California, the county coroner’s office released a report ruling the Latino father’s death a homicide.
In a report released Friday, the Alameda County coroner’s office declared Gonzalez’s death a homicide, listing the cause as “toxic effects of methamphetamine” with other “significant conditions” including the “physiological stress of altercation and restraint,” as well as “obesity” and “alcoholism.”
Video from April 19 showed Alameda police officers kneeling on Gonzalez’s back for nearly five minutes until he stopped breathing and lost his pulse.
Police body camera footage, released after an outcry from Gonzalez’s family, showed officers approaching Gonzalez, alone in a park with some bottles of alcohol, after a neighbor called about someone being intoxicated. The footage shows Gonzalez calmly speaking with officers for nearly nine minutes. Then officers put Gonzalez’s hands behind his back and pinned him facedown while at least one officer knelt on him until he became unresponsive.
By the time Gonzalez arrived at a hospital, he “had no pulse and was not breathing,” according to the coroner’s the report.
After the report was released, the Alameda police chief extended “sincere condolences” to the family, saying in a statement that “anytime someone loses their life, it is a tragedy.”
The three officers — James Fisher, Cameron Leahy and Eric McKinley — remain on paid administrative leave, according to the police chief.
The police chief said it was now up to the Alameda County district attorney’s office to decide whether to file charges against the officers.
The district attorney’s office declined to provide a statement to HuffPost, saying that “this is still an ongoing investigation.”
Gonzalez’s family has demanded that the officers involved be fired and charged. Gonzalez had a 4-year-old son and took care of his 22-year-old brother, who was autistic.
The autopsy report was “pretty much consistent with what we believe, which is that Mario would still be here if not for the overaggressive heavy-handed tactics of the police,” Gonzalez’s mother’s attorney, Adante Pointer, told San Francisco’s KQED News.
The lawyer added that Gonzalez “would have lived through” the health conditions and substance use highlighted in the coroner’s report “if he had not interacted with police.”
“You still can’t run from the ultimate conclusion that this was a homicide and the police officers should be held accountable,” the attorney said.