Jury in California ensures accountability in deadly police shooting case

Last week, Americans went to the polls to decide who should wield power in Washington D.C. Twelve days before Election Day, seven Americans serving on a federal jury offered their own answer.

They listened to a mother describe how San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies killed her son. Then they held those deputies accountable.

Antonio “Tony” Garza Jr. was 44, a union mechanic and welder. He built his sister a nine-foot farm table. When his father became ill, Tony built him a wheelchair ramp and remodeled the bathroom so he could bathe. After his father died, Tony promised his mother, Matilde, he would take care of her. He lived a mile and a half away and visited almost daily.

You probably know somebody like Tony. The family member everyone calls when something breaks.

Tony also had bipolar disorder. As his illness worsened, his family struggled to get him treatment. He spent months in jail waiting for a mental-health bed that never materialized. After his release, Matilde took him to the county behavioral-health office. She testified that they turned him away because he wasn’t suicidal.

Less than two weeks later, deputies shot him dead.

On Feb. 5, 2023, deputies responding to a report of a fire at Tony’s property chased his pickup nearly 30 miles. Tony drove dangerously. When he finally stopped beside Interstate 10, he ran into the desert holding a golf club, shouting for deputies to shoot him.

Deputies Nicholas Kridner and Bill Abernathy testified that Tony raised the club threateningly and they feared for their lives. They fired 21 rounds in two volleys, striking him 12 times. Autopsy evidence documented wounds from behind and others inflicted while he was on the ground.

A passing motorist filmed part of the encounter. The deputies had no body cameras.

Matilde learned her son was dead from her daughters. No one from the sheriff’s department came to tell her.

The department found the shooting within policy. Neither deputy was disciplined or criminally charged. Abernathy became a detective; at trial, Kridner was introduced as soon to become one. Jurors also learned the department had rejected Kridner for dishonesty during hiring, then hired him anyway.

The Garza family was represented by a team of civil rights lawyers: Rebecca Brown, Brian Olney and David Clay Washington. Brown opened with a simple declaration: “Antonio Garza, Jr. did not need to die.” Olney delivered the closing argument. Washington, who had worked with young people in mental-health crises and challenged prison conditions in Alabama, confronted Kridner with a recording from his own belt.

Kridner had testified he couldn’t remember ordering Tony to “roll over” before the second volley. The jury heard the order. Kridner acknowledged giving it.

Eleven months after Tony’s death, the department’s deputies shot and killed Frank Glasgow, 57, after he called 911 saying he wanted police to kill him. Washington says Kridner was among the deputies who fired. The department said Glasgow charged a deputy with a knife.

Presiding over Tony’s case was Judge Consuelo Bland Marshall, a Black woman born in segregated Knoxville, Tennessee. She was one of four women in her class of 60 at Howard University School of Law. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office told her it didn’t hire women lawyers. She became its first. She later practiced with Johnnie Cochran. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the federal bench in 1980; she eventually became that court’s first woman chief judge.

On Oct. 22, the seven jurors unanimously awarded Matilde and Tony’s estate $51.8 million, believed to be California’s largest police-shooting jury verdict. That included $10 million in punitive damages against the deputies. They also found a violation of Tony’s rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“These jurors are the only accountability anyone has seen,” Washington told me.

The verdict may be appealed. No amount can bring Tony home. But from Southern California to Chicago, families deserve to know that a badge doesn’t put anyone beyond accountability.

When the news from the powers that be in Washington, D.C., makes us doubt our country’s promises, remember Matilde Garza. She once hiked through Joshua Tree with Tony while her granddaughter photographed the wildflowers. These days, she rarely leaves home. But she went to court, and seven strangers heard her son’s story and held the deputies accountable.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.