Cops Charge Teen With Murder After One Of Them Dies Shortly After Restraining Him
Cops will charge someone with assault, whether or not they've been actually assaulted. It's a charge often added on top of resisting arrest and can be triggered by any movement or action that results in physical contact with an officer. Throwing a snowball in the direction of a cop can be considered assault, depending on the enthusiasm of the nearest prosecutor.
But this is the first time we've seen someone charged with murder because a cop happened to die shortly after restraining someone. It all started with cops going in heavy despite there being no reason to do so.
18-year-old Virgilio Aguilar Mendez was standing outside of his motel room talking to his mother on the phone when St. Johns County police officer Michael Kunovich approached him. Apparently Kunovich had been alerted to the presence of a suspicious Hispanic male" by dispatch - a vague description that could have covered multiple residents of St. Augustine, Florida.
Mendez does not speak English. Nor does he speak Spanish. Instead, he speaks the Mayan language Mam, spoken in some areas of his native Guatemala. Sergeant Kunovich apparently decided to interpret Mendez's inability to understand his orders as resistance and decided to head in the direction of escalation. Victoria Valenzuela details what happened next for Truthout.
Kunovich started searching the teenager for weapons, according totheFlorida Times-Union. Startled, the confused 5-foot-4, 115-pound teen resisted. During the eight minute struggle, Kunovich called two other deputies to assist him. They pushed and pinned Aguilar Mendez to the ground, held him in a chokehold, and stunned him with his tasersix times in two minutes.
Three cops versus a 5'4'', 115-pound teen. Seems like about as fair a fight as officers could desire. Following their assault on Mendez, something unusual happened.
Five minutes afterthey handcuffed the teenagerand put him in a patrol car, Kunovich collapsed and was transported to a hospital where he died.
Mendez never attacked Kunovich. Kunovich attacked Mendez. Whatever effort Kunovich exerted during this prolonged struggle to subdue someone best described as pretty easy to subdue" apparently took his life.
This would seem to be the unfortunate outcome of exerting effort your body can't handle. What should have been considered nothing more than an unforeseen tragedy has instead become a tragedy of a different sort: a person charged with murder just because a cop happened to die after (let's be clear here) the cop pinned them to the ground and tased them multiple times.
[T]he St. John's County Sheriff's Office and the Office of the State Attorney for the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida charged Aguilar Mendez with aggravated murder, which is punishable by life in prison.
This happened despite the coroner's determination that Sergeant Kunovich's death was due to natural causes, rather than anything Mendez deliberately or inadvertently did.
These cardiac changes, while recent, predate the struggle with the subject," the report said. The circumstances do not fully meet the criteria for a homicide manner of death."
Since it looks like the murder charges may have trouble sticking, the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office has been applying a lot of spin to the story. The body camera footage that has been released shows deputies recovering a small pocket knife from Mendez's pants after he was handcuffed. Pocket knives are for pockets, so the mere existence of a knife adds nothing to the supposed reasonable suspicion that predicated this chain of events. But the Sheriff insists that Mendez pulled a knife" on Sergeant Kunovich, which apparently is enough to justify the murder charge filed against him after Kunovich died. Kunovich's body cam footage makes it clear this supposed pulling" of a knife never happened.
It's all ridiculous and awful. Mendez has been held without bail for eight months, supposedly because he's a cop killer. This has happened despite the court finding last December that Mendez was incompetent to stand trial because he doesn't speak English or Spanish and is completely unfamiliar with the US justice system.
This is insane. Would prosecutors have brought charges if the officer died 30 minutes after the encounter? A day later? A week later? If an officer aggravates preexisting health conditions during an arrest, should arrestees be criminally culpable for any health complications or deaths following officers, you know, doing their jobs?
The answer is obviously no." And let's not even pretend this is the equivalent of charging cops with assault or murder when they restrain someone to hospitalization or death. There's a big difference here, and if you can't see it, it's only because you don't want to see it. In both cases, officers are the ones doing the restraining. Force applications that lead to severe injury or death are almost always excessive.
Pinning someone to the ground and putting the full weight of several officers on them is more likely to kill whoever's under the pile rather than those who are on top. Just because this one went the other way doesn't make it murder. It just makes it an anomaly. This is just petty vindictiveness that's only petty in the sense that it's law enforcement officers trying to get even" for the death of one of their own. There's nothing petty, however, about the consequences of this petty bullshit: someone is facing life in prison because an officer happened to die while on duty.