During internal discussions, two investigators with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department have said they are at the end of the envelope in stretching logic and interpretation to clear a fellow law enforcement officer of an inappropriate use of what may turn out to have been deadly force with regard to a Fontana man who was first shot and then beaten into unconsciousness while his arrest was being effectuated on September 24.
It is not the shooting of Jesus Adrian Garcia, which occurred around 2:30 in the afternoon, that is giving the investigators pause, the Sentinel has been told.
Rather, it will be virtually impossible to catalog the beating that Garcia was administered after he was shot, on the ground and no longer in possession of the weapon he had previously wielded as anything less than an assault under the color of authority, one of the investigators conveyed to a department colleague.
If the autopsy performed on Garcia offers a conclusion that the blows Garcia sustained to his head were the cause of, or a contributory factor in, his death, there is a potential the officer will be charged manslaughter, aggravated manslaughter or second-degree murder.
The Fontana Police Department officer who assaulted Garcia after he was shot was not the officer who shot him.
One of the investigators with sheriff’s department assigned to the case, prior to the autopsy being done, remarked, the Sentinel is informed, that all should pray or keep their fingers crossed that the autopsy does not indicate that the beating administered to the prone Garcia was a contributory factor in his death.
Garcia had an extensive criminal record which had brought him into contact with the Fontana Police Department previously, and there were indications that he had engaged in similar acts of destruction and mayhem to those which precipitated the September 24 cascade of violence that ended in his death.
Garcia was arrested and charged with a total of at least eight felonies and no fewer than eleven misdemeanors going back over a decade.
In June 2021, he entered a no contest plea to a charge of assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury, after he was initially arrested and charged in February of that year with assault with a deadly weapon, involving his having used a crowbar in his assault on a man he was robbing in Fontana. He was initially given a jail sentence of 252 days for that crime, which was changed to 316 days in county jail when he violated probation. Upon another violation, Garcia was sent into confinement in state prison. The time he actually served in that matter is not available.
In 2018, he was convicted of possessing, manufacturing and selling a dangerous weapon, i.e., a lead-filled pipe. He was ultimately sentenced to 366 days in prison for that offense, serving half that time.
In 2017 he was sent to state prison to serve a sentence of unspecified duration for a 2014 vehicular hit and run in which the victim suffered what was described as either permanent injury or death.
His criminal record is replete with other arrests and/or convictions on home invasion robbery, weapons violations, criminal threats, grand theft auto, grand theft, petty theft, brandishing a replica firearm, battery and domestic violence. He has further arrests for parole violations, probation violations, trespassing, possession of narcotics, possession of narcotic paraphernalia and driving under the influence. In addition to a handful of vehicle-related infractions, he had been cited for a smattering of relatively uncommon non-vehicular-related infractions, some of which he was convicted on and some which were dismissed when he entered a plea on another charge for which he was simultaneously appearing in court. Those included vending within a freeway right-of-way in 2017, remaining in certain places without consent in 2017 and aggressive begging in 2020.
On September 24, Garcia, carrying an approximately 38-inch thin metal pipe or rod, entered an Auto Zone store in the shopping center at the southwest corner of the Cherry Avenue and Baseline Road intersection around 2:17 p.m. Using the pipe, he smashed or damaged computers and registers, and assaulted an employee.
The police were summoned and were en route to the location by 2:20 p.m.
When the first of the responding police officers arrived, Garcia was no longer in the Auto Zone, but was wandering, somewhat aimlessly around the parking lot, yet clutching the metal pipe. 
Angelo Areseo Mario Lakey, a marketing director with Inland Medical Center, happened to be ideally situated roughly 50 to 60 feet from where the shooting took place. He captured a crucial 5 minute and 8 second video of the confrontation between the officers and Garcia. That footage shows Garcia after he had come out of the Auto Zone carrying what looked to be a slightly truncated golf club in his right hand as he is walking across the shopping center parking lot. The video, later mounted on the website Grindface TV, begins just after Garcia had passed by a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant, where Lakey was headed to get lunch, when the contretemps of Garcia’s destruction inside the Auto Zone and his exit therefrom caught his attention. Garcia is seen in the video walking in a direction away from the video camera, while he is swinging the metal rod back and forth in a somewhat exaggerated arc corresponding to his strides. About five seconds into the video, a short siren burst can be heard, and both Garcia, depicted in the video yet walking away, and Lakey, holding the camera, pivot to look in the direction of the siren sound. The video’s field of view sweeps to the left, momentarily no longer trained on Garcia, and at 8 seconds into the video, a Fontana Police Department patrol vehicle, a black and white SUV, can be seen. The video’s field of view turns back to Garcia, who has continued to move away. Twenty-three seconds into the video, the patrol SUV has begun to move and cuts across the field of the video from left to right to move out across the parking lot on an angle to intercept Garcia, who is yet walking away. When the SUV was about 40 feet or so from Garcia, at the 28 second point in the video, the police officer is gliding the patrol vehicle to a halt, having begun to open the driver side door before coming to a complete stop. At 31 seconds into the video, the SUV is still creeping forward, and Garcia has turned to face the police car, at which point he begins to approach it, again taking exaggerated strides and half swinging the metal rod while changing his main grip on it from his left hand to his right hand and then back to his left. At 33 seconds into the video, the officer has opened the door more fully and begins to slide out from behind the wheel, even as Garcia, at that point perhaps 20 feet or so in front of the vehicle begins to move more rapidly toward the officer. As Garcia approaches to about five feet in from of the patrol SUV, the officer at first seems intent on keeping the door open as a makeshift shield, but he abandons that as Garcia is closing on him and the car. As the officer flings the door shut and steps back, Garcia steps rapidly forward to a point immediately in front of the vehicles left side bumper. Lifting the metal pipe with both hands directly above his head, Garcia, at 39 seconds into the video, slams it down into the windshield of the car, whereupon he immediate recoils and looks as if he is going to make a left-handed swing at the officer. He double clutches with the left-hand swing, but ultimately does not swing from that angle. Instead, at 41 seconds into the video, he raises the metal rod directly over his head and then flings it forward at the officer, letting it fly. It appears the metal pipe, after hitting the ground, careens into the left shin of the officer, who steps back sharply. The rod then appears to come to rest, blending in with the ground. At the 42 and 43 second mark of the video, the officer, stepping back rapidly, fires five shots. At the 44 second mark, Garcia can be seen pivoting a bit to his left and then collapsing.
Cautiously, the officer moves forward and to his right slightly while he closely regards the fallen Garcia, who is yet conscious and animated, with his hands rapidly alternately clutching toward his upper chest and then dropping back onto the ground while he engages in a partial bellow, partial yell and partial moan, raising his arms above him and then back over his head and again dropping them to his sides, as the sound of an approaching siren is heard and the officer, appearing to still be training his gun on the fallen man, has stepped to his left away from his vehicle and closer to Garcia.
The vehicle with the siren comes into the field of vision in the video at the one minute and 20 second mark. The officer driving that vehicle moves with obvious purpose toward the scene of the shooting, doing so rapidly and appearing headed directly toward the prone Garcia. The driver cuts to his right, however, guiding the momentum of the patrol car so that he misses Garcia by somewhere between 10 and 15 feet, and then comes to a stop.
That officer emerges from the vehicle one minute and 27 seconds into the video. He immediately begins barking commands at Garcia, telling him to “lay down and get on your stomach.” The somewhat corpulent Garcia who was writhing previously, attempts, it appears, to comply with the second officer’s command, but does not seem to be able to get enough momentum to do more than flip over onto his side. The recently-arrived second officer, producing a pair of nylon gloves from what appears to be his left pocket, begins to put them on while Garcia is struggling, unsuccessfully, to roll over so that he is face down on the pavement, managing only to make it on his side. Upon drawing on the gloves, the second officer straddles Garcia and, bending down, punches him three times, aiming at his head, which is flush against the pavement. Just after the first punch lands, Garcia extends his left arm, it appears, to protect his face. With the officer’s second blow, Garcia looked to have been knocked out cold. The third punch seemed to have landed while he was no longer conscious.
There are a few moments on the Lakey video, including ones that come at crucial points in the interaction between Garcia and officers, where all of the action is not captured because the visual field shifted. That, however, is of less consequence than it might otherwise be because there are other video resources which the investigators can rely upon.
As the first officer was shooting Garcia, Lakey appears to have moved or flinched, such that for about a second, all of Garcia’s body except for the bottoms of his legs and his shoes move out of the field of view. The officer, however, was wearing a bodyworn camera. An individual who has seen images from the bodyworn camera video said that it clearly establishes that in the moments leading up to the shooting, Garcia represented a threat to the officer.
Similarly, in the seconds just before the second officer strikes Garcia as he is straddling him, the field of vision in the video shifted to the side, such that what precisely occurred just before the officer began raining the blows upon Garcia is not clear. As it so happens, however, at least three passers-by at the scene used their cell phones to make a visual documentation of what was transpiring. Two of those videos – one shot by Ailah Ponla and the other taken by an individual who has requested that his identity not be released, have now made their way into the public domain, having been utilized in televised news reports. Both show, from different angles, the events leading up to the second officer punching Garcia in the head, as well as all three punches.
Based upon information conveyed to the Sentinel by those in contact with the investigators looking into Garcia’s death at the hands of the Fontana Police Department, it is those three punches rather than the five gun shots one minute and ten seconds earlier that are going to prove problematic. What was indicated by one of the sheriff’s department investigators is that the punches were gratuitous on multiple levels. When he was punched, Garcia had already been shot. At that point, he was at best gravely wounded, if not mortally wounded. He was on the ground and appeared unable to get to his feet. He was attempting, but was unable, because of his injuries and condition, to comply with the officer’s commands to roll over into a face-down position. Those considerations made the administration of the head punches unnecessary, the investigators have concluded.
Moreover, one of the investigators remarked, there is a possibility that it was the blows to Garcia’s head that killed him rather than the gunshot wounds. It was noted that Garcia was knocked into unconsciousness by the punches and never regained consciousness before he was pronounced dead just a few hours later. There are grounds to pursue, one of the investigators said prior to the completion of Garcia’s autopsy, making a determination of whether Garcia was suffering from swelling of the brain and bleeding into the brain at the time of his death.
The individual conveying the information to the Sentinel about the preliminary findings and discussion by the investigators looking to Garcia’s death emphasized that it is premature to make a conclusion as to the exact cause of death prior to the filing of the autopsy, and that Garcia had been shot multiple times at close range was a factor of substantial consideration.
Even if, however, it is firmly established that the punches Garcia sustained just a few hours before he expired had nothing to do with his demise, the second officer yet finds himself in what is very likely to become an untenable position, primarily because of the layer upon layer of indisputable evidence against him. In addition to the four known videos of what occurred in the parking lot of the Vons shopping center at Baseline and Cherry, there is his own bodyworn camera video, the bodyworn video footage of the other officer and potentially video footage from any of a number of security cameras that may or may not have been positioned to capture what occurred. Worse still, from the officer’s standpoint, is that at least three of those videos have now been publicly displayed, having been viewed by, at this point, tens of thousands of viewers.
The two sheriff’s department investigators assigned to the matter are under a tremendous degree of pressure to complete their examination and deliver a report that will allow prosecutors to reject filing any criminal charges against the officers involved. The general consensus is that clearing the officer who wielded the gun against Garcia is virtually a done deal. Several civilian witness at various spots around the parking lot have stated that Garcia was posing a clear and indisputable risk to the first officer. Giving the officer who arrived late on the scene and within less than 30 seconds placed the suspect he encountered into a coma from which he never emerged is going to be a little more challenging.
District Attorney Jason Anderson has no stomach and no desire to subject any law enforcement personnel to prosecution. Fontana Police Chief Michael Dorsey does not want to be put in the position of firing, or even suspending, one of his sworn officers. The police officers in Fontana do not want, nor do the deputies and higher-ranking members of the sheriff’s department want to see a fellow law enforcement officer brought into disgrace for being aggressive in bringing into custody an individual with Garcia’s criminal history who had just put at risk nearby civilians and another police officer. The investigators’ boss – Sheriff Shannon Dicus – has nothing to gain by having his department put a criminal case together against a member of the county’s third-largest police department or a member of any police department.
Yet, letting the officer who roughed Garcia up while he was lying dying on the ground and unable to defend himself slip out the side door might touch off a round of scrutiny by the California Attorney General’s Office or the U.S. Department of Justice that it would be better for everyone, including the second police officer to arrive on the scene of the disturbance at the Fontana Vons Shopping Center on the afternoon of September 24, to avoid.
The paradoxical reality remains that by charging him with assault under the color of authority, Jason Anderson would be doing the officer a favor. While such a move would almost certainly end the peace officer’s law enforcement career, it would likely preclude Rob Bonta from charging him with manslaughter or second-degree murder, while simultaneously limiting the possibility that Merrick Garland would find it incumbent upon himself to place the former steel town’s police department under a consent decree.
-Mark Gutglueck