A 32-year-old Rancho Cucamonga man got exactly what he deserved when he mixed it up with deputies who had been called to an apartment complex in March 2024 in response to his erratic behavior and he ended up dead, those proud of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department say.
In contrast, the man’s family members have filed suit against the department, alleging excessive force was employed against the man and inadequate care was rendered to him after he was severely beaten.
Some 22 minutes after midnight on March 19, 2024, deputies in Rancho Cucamonga engaged in a violent encounter with Mohd Hijaz in the 10100 block of Foothill Boulevard, just east of the Foothill/Hermosa Avenue intersection, following a report by a nearby resident that an individual was acting erratically, seeking to open apartment and vehicle doors, and that he had pulled the building’s fire alarm.
After locating Hijaz “seated in a bush” and yelling incoherently, two female deputies reported that Hijaz without warning advanced toward them and refused multiple commands to stop, at which point they both employed their tasers in an effort to keep him at a distance.
A second patrol car arrived, whereupon two male deputies intervened.
“[A] use of force occurred.” according to the department, during which Hijaz struck one deputy in the face. In the ensuing struggle, Hijaz was lifted off his feet and brought with force to the ground by a deputy in an ultimately successful move to end Hijaz’s combativeness.
Hijaz lost consciousness and was transported to San Antonio Community Hospital, where he was determined to have died.
Hijaz’s widow, Nada Osama Nafaa, and Hijaz’s mother, Fathieh Jawdat Naji, have retained an attorney, Sa’id Vakili of the Los Angeles-based law firm of Vakili & Leus, to represent them and the young child Hijaz had with Nafaa in a lawsuit alleging the use of excessive force against Hijaz resulted in his wrongful death,
According to the suit, Hijaz, while seated on a curb and was engaged in a conversation with a driver who was passing by. Shortly after the driver responded to Hijaz’s request for water, the two deputies arrived.
The deputies maintain it was Hijaz who approached them and that administering the multiple electrical shocks from their tasers was necessary to prevent Hijaz from overpowering one or both of them.
The family’s complaint alleges that the deputies used excessive force, landing repeated blows with their truncheons and slamming his head into the pavement. The autopsy, which was performed by the San Bernardino County Coroner’s Office, which is another division of the sheriff’s department, while indicating Hijaz had multiple contusions and bruising, does not conclusively state that the electrical shocks administered by the two female deputies or the violence visited upon him by the two male deputies led to his death. That alone exonerates the deputies, according to the department.
Moreover, it was observed, Hijaz did not comply with lawful commands issued to him by the first deputies on the scene and he assaulted one of the male deputies, which by longstanding custom is unacceptable conduct on the streets of Rancho Cucamonga, where the sheriff’s department serves as that city’s contract police department.
Hijaz was not accorded treatment any different than what anyone else would get in the same situation, according to the department. While it was true that Hijaz represented a threat, perhaps a mortal one, to the first two responding officers, the Sentinel was told, the accusation that the second two responding officers were putting on a display of machismo in dealing with Hijaz in order to impress their two distaff colleagues is “pure horseshit.”
Hijaz’s death was one of a rash of four publicized use-of-force incidents involving the sheriff’s department during the month of March 2024. Three of the four civilians encountering sheriff’s deputies in those incidents died.
On March 9, 2024 Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old resident of Apple Valley was shot in the torso what is believed to be three times by a deputy as he wielded a bladed garden hoe and galloped toward another deputy who had arrived at the Gainer Family home on Iroquois Road in response to calls for assistance by a member of the Gainer family. Gainer died. Hijaz’s encounter with the sheriff’s department took place on March 19. On March 23, 2024 in Hesperia, deputies were attempting to serve a domestic violence warrant for 52-year-old Keith Vinyard’s arrest when they shot and killed him after he led them on a vehicle chase in which he attempted to escape, was driving recklessly and armed himself, deputies said, with a large metal object when the pursuit ended. On March 26, while sheriff’s deputies were attempting to place Cardenas Alonso, a 36-year-old Hesperia tattoo shop owner, under arrest for what they said was his involvement in an armed robbery two days previously, a passerby captured a video of the treatment he had been subjected to. The arrest, which Alonso’s place of business, initially entailed two deputies and one plain-clothes detective forcefully holding him face down on the side of the roadway behind his car, during which he sustains multiple blows to the back of his head while his face is being scraped or raked with force against the pavement on the shoulder of the road. After a fourth deputy became involved, the plain-clothes detective, who had already kneed the prone Alonzo three times in the head, repositioned himself on the other side of Alonzo and kneed him five times with a greater degree of force to the head, then punched him straight down to the head with Alonso’s head against the pavement four times and then knees him to the head again.
Sheriff’s department deputies are outfitted with bodyworn video cameras.
The department released the video of the Gainer shooting. It has consistently refused to release any of the bodyworn video cameras’ footage of the deputies’ fatal encounter with Hijaz, the shooting of Vinyard or Alonzo’s arrest.
In Alonzo’s case, the video of the arrest shot on the cellphone of someone in the vicinity was posted to the internet, where it went viral.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the lawsuit filed by Vakili on behalf of Nafaa, Naji and the minor, the sheriff’s department is withholding the bodyworn camera footage of the deputies involved in Hijaz’s death, Hijaz’s autopsy report and surveillance video footage captured by a security video in the apartment complex where the incident with Hijaz took place and which the department secured after Hijaz’s death.
All of that is understandable, those who think highly of the sheriff’s department maintain. “You can choose to believe what you want, whether it’s true or not,” one of those said. “The real truth is the people on the street these deputies deal with, many of them, are not nice people. What happened here is this guy was high or having an episode or whatever you want to call it and then he went after two women. When the big boys showed up, it turned out he wasn’t as tough as he thought he was. End of story.”