Manslaughter charges were formally dropped Thursday against two Torrance police officers charged in the 2018 shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a carjacking suspect who was wielding an air rifle when he was killed.
County of Los Angeles County. He said. Nathan Hochman has announced his intention to withdraw the lawsuit, which was filed by his predecessor late last year. But Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta delayed a decision on the motion to dismiss because of a number of technical issues over the past six months, before ending the case against Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez on Thursday morning.
Concannon and Chavez were charged in 2023 with the 2018 murder of Mitchell, 23. Mitchell was sitting in his car at a supermarket with an air rifle between his knees when he was killed. Although Mitchell never pointed the weapon at any officer, Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reach for what he believed to be a real gun when he fired, according to court records.
The case involved three district attorney’s offices. Then Dist. He said. Jackie Lacey initially cleared the police of wrongdoing, but Dist. He said. George Gascón reopened the case and assigned a special prosecutor to review his decision. A grand jury indictment for both is scheduled for 2023.
Both officers were investigated amid the Torrance Police Department’s 2021 racist texting scandal, in which more than a dozen officers were found to have shared a series of texts filled with homophobic slurs, promises of violence against Black suspects and jokes about excessive force. Concanon was eventually found not to have sent the racist texts. Chavez sent several text messages, according to the district attorney’s office.
Mitchell was black, and activists suggested the documents proved racial animus played a role in the case. In another series of messages, police used the N-word to describe Mitchell’s relatives and joked about what would happen after the names of Concannon and Chavez were revealed.
“A gun cleaning party at my house when they put my name out??” Chavez asked, according to the motion to dismiss.
“Yes, let’s just stick some lawn chairs in your yard.” [firing] party,” another responded, according to a district attorney’s office report on messages that were released to the public during the 2022 court hearing.
The eviction continued in court for a half-hour, with Mitchell’s mother joined by Black Lives Matter LA organizers and other police accountability activists. In the back row sat many supporters of Concannon and Chavez, including a Torrance police officer in full uniform.
“Please stop defending them when they do bad things, because when you do that, people might trust you,” Mitchell’s mother, Sherilyn Haines, pleaded with Ohta before he ruled. “They will continue to kill our children with the same slogan ‘We feared for our lives’.”
When Ohta finished reading his 34-page decision, several protesters chanted Mitchell’s name and shouted at Concannon, calling him a “murderer.” Chavez did not attend to this issue.
Mitchell’s family was awarded $7.8 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit in 2022, shortly after a judge granted their request for access to records related to a “dirty text message” from 2016.
The family’s attorney, Peter Carr, questioned the reasoning behind Hochman’s motion to dismiss, saying prosecutors “have been changing the reasons for the foregone conclusion” in every appeal. He noted their original motion to dismiss said Ohta had denied critical evidence in the case. Ohta later said the district attorney’s explanation was wrong.
However, in agreeing to the request, Ohta said he found no concrete evidence that the district attorney’s office was dismissing the case in bad faith.
“I am very happy that this nightmare is over for my client,” said Chavez’s lawyer, Tom Yu. “Police officers across the country have to make different decisions every day and unfortunately, some decisions include the use of lethal force.”
Yu said he believed the shooting was “totally justified.”
Police lawyers have long argued that Gascón overstepped his bounds in bringing the case and that the private prosecutor he hired, Lawrence Middleton, made numerous mistakes in filing the charges.
A report made last year by the special prosecutor Hochman hired to review the cases Gascón reopened found that Middleton failed to present the necessary evidence to justify the grand jury and improperly instructed the panel on the elements of the crime of voluntary manslaughter.
Middleton, who was fired by Hochman shortly after his 2024 election, was present in court but declined to comment.
Hochman has faced criticism for his handling of police abuse cases, with some questioning his decisions to offer lenient deals and drop charges against several officers. Last month, however, Hochman charged a California Highway Patrol officer with manslaughter after causing an on-the-job accident that resulted in multiple deaths.
