APD announces ruling in police shooting case

After six months of investigations and review, Austin Police Department Officer Leonardo Quintana will be suspended 15 days for not recording on his dashboard camera the events that led to the shooting death of 18-year-old Nathaniel Sanders in May.

APD Chief Art Acevedo announced the decision Wednesday, saying Quintana did not use excessive force and did not escalate the situation beyond what was necessary but did fail to abide by APD’s mobile video recorder policy. Acevedo said the infraction was a very serious policy violation.

The events leading to the shooting at an apartment complex in East Austin began May 9 as an investigation of a series of robberies. A Mercedes-Benz station wagon has been linked to the incidents. On that same day, residents of the complex complained that shots were fired from the occupants of a similar station wagon.

The morning of May 11, Quintana encountered the station wagon and approached it with his emergency lights and on-dash camera turned off. He detained without incident the driver of the vehicle, Michael Franklin, as he stepped out and walked toward the complex.

Officers John Alexander Hitzelberg and Mohammad Siddiqui arrived as Quintana placed Franklin in his patrol car. Hitzelberg was the only officer who had his on-dash camera turned on, but it was not pointed toward the incident and only captured audio.

The officers discovered Sanders and another passenger, Sir Smith, asleep in the vehicle.

According to APD officials, as Quintana attempted to awaken Sanders, a struggle began and Sanders reached for a handgun. Quintana retreated and fired three shots. The third struck Sanders in the back of the head, killing him.

Smith exited the vehicle, and Quintana fired at him as well, striking him once in the stomach.

“The use of force by Officer Quintana was objectively reasonable based on the totality of the circumstances,” Acevedo said.

Adam Loewy, attorney for the Sanders family, said the video camera was a red herring and is distracting APD and the public from the actual shooting.

“I think it’s insulting if [Acevedo] is focusing on this camera issue, when you have a young man who was shot in the head, and I think we need to talk about that more,” Loewy said.

“The forensic evidence in the case — Nate Sanders’ fingerprints were not on the gun — that’s pretty big evidence.”

Acevedo also suspended Siddiqui for three days for not turning on his on-dash camera. He proposed a new camera policy, effective immediately, which suspends an officer for one to three days for the first incident and increases the punishment for each subsequent violation. For intentionally not turning on a camera, an officer may receive a four to 15 day suspension and for a second intentional violation, the officer will be suspended indefinitely.

As a result of Austin residents’ uproar over the incident, the Citizens Review Panel asked City Manager Marc Ott to request an independent review of APD’s internal affairs investigation of the incident.

Keypoint Government Solutions reviewed the case and found “internal affairs to be biased toward the involved officers in a way which undermines the credibility of its investigation.”

Acevedo said the area Quintana responded to was known to be a high crime area.

“Based on that history and a myriad of other issues and factors, he decided to approach the problem the way he did, though I personally wouldn’t have approached [it] the same way,” Acevedo said.

Acevedo will discuss the internal affairs investigation today, It, along with the Keypoint review of the investigation, will be released to the public.

“This was just a tragic incident,” said Wayne Vincent, Austin Police Association president. “Sometimes there is nobody to blame. If there is anybody to blame, it could be the individual that made the choice to reach for the weapon. I don’t think this situation called for him to do that and [Quintana] explained why he took the actions he did and it was reasonable.”

Vincent and Acevedo both agree that emotion must be taken out and facts need to be assessed when analyzing a situation like the Sanders shooting. They both said digital on-dash cameras, which record at all times, could help avoid a future controversial shooting.

“We have to make our decisions based on the facts, based on the evidence and I would just ask people to please judge this incident based on the evidence that will be part of the public record,” Acevedo said. “We cannot make our officers pay the sins of their fathers.”

Comments

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out