D.A. moves to drop charges against Torrance officers in 2018 shooting
Los Angeles County prosecutors moved to drop manslaughter charges Friday against two Torrance police officers who shot and killed a Black man in 2018, attempting to end a seven-year saga that saw the case rejected and then reexamined by three different district attorneys.
Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 for the shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a 23-year-old car theft suspect who was in possession of an air rifle at the time he was killed.
Michael Gennaco, a special prosecutor hired earlier this year by Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman to review the case, filed a motion to dismiss charges late Thursday, saying he did not believe prosecutors could prove voluntary manslaughter at trial. Attorneys for the officers filed a joint motion in agreement, they said in court Friday.
But in a surprising move, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta declined to rule on the motion Friday, because the case is currently under the jurisdiction of the California Supreme Court. Concannon’s attorneys had previously filed a writ of habeas corpus after Ohta rejected a motion to dismiss the charges.
“I am not going to rule on this because it would be inappropriate for me to do that at this point. The Supreme Court has to tell us its decision,” Ohta said.
One of Concannon’s attorneys, Matthew Murphy, said he felt Ohta was punishing the defendants for exercising their right to challenge Ohta’s prior ruling. Ohta slapped that argument down, pointing out it was the defense team who put the case before the California Supreme Court.
Ohta signaled he wouldn’t decide the motion until the case was withdrawn from the Supreme Court, and even then, he would need time to review the filings.
Ohta said he was “surprised” that the motion was filed at 3 p.m. on Thursday, giving him little time to digest it ahead of Friday’s 8:30 a.m. appearance.
“It’s going to be a lot of work. I’m not just going to orally say yes go ahead and dismiss the case, case dismissed,” the judge said.
Murphy said he would move to withdraw the habeas filing.
Chavez and Concannon were among those investigated in 2021 when the district attorney’s office uncovered a thread of racist text messages sent by members of the Torrance Police Department. The Times has never seen evidence that either of the two officers sent racist messages, but the scandal infuriated community activists, who have long called for them to face justice for killing Mitchell.
Jeff Lewis, a civil attorney for Concannon, said his client “never sent or replied to any racist messages.”
The shooting incident occurred when officers approached Mitchell while he was seated in the car in a Ralph’s parking lot. They said they spotted what was later revealed to be a “break barrel air rifle” between his legs.
Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed to be a real firearm and opened fire, according to the district attorney’s office. Chavez fired two rounds immediately after. The two officers then retreated and waited for backup.
Nearly 30 minutes elapsed before anyone checked on Mitchell, who was then pronounced dead of gunshot wounds, according to court records.
Concannon and Chavez were initially cleared of all wrongdoing by then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey. But when George Gascón swept into office on a police accountability platform and ousted Lacey in 2020, he hired a special prosecutor to reexamine several cases Lacey declined to prosecute, including Mitchell’s death.
But Lawrence Middleton, the special prosecutor brought on by Gascón, did not obtain an indictment in the case until 2023, more than two years after he had been hired to reconsider charges in shootings by police.
The statute of limitations for involuntary manslaughter, an easier case to prove than the voluntary manslaughter charges that Middleton brought, expired in late 2021. Concerns about the timeline Middleton would face to pursue the cases Gascón targeted were raised almost immediately after he joined the D.A.’s office.
Middleton appeared in the courtroom Friday morning and sat beside Mitchell’s mother and a number of activists who have long monitored the trial. All declined to comment.
Middleton previously argued the officers “created the jeopardy that led to the shooting,” by needlessly confronting Mitchell when he was not a threat and had no means of escaping arrest as the car was parked facing a wall, according to grand jury transcripts. But Ohta disallowed that evidence after a hearing in late 2023. The shooting happened in 2018, two years before a change in California law modified the threshold by which fatal uses of force are judged.
Hochman fired Middleton shortly after ousting Gascón in the 2024 election cycle, a move which drew praise from one of Concannon’s attorneys at the time. Gennaco was hired a short time later. He also declined to comment on Ohta’s refusal to rule on the dismissal motion.
In an interview, Hochman said that while he did not believe the officers were “innocent” he also did not think prosecutors could meet the legal bar needed to prove voluntary manslaughter. He said Gascón and Middleton bungled the case.
Hochman questioned Middleton’s attempt to argue that the officers executed the arrest of Mitchell so poorly that they caused the situation that required the use of deadly force.
That evidence of so-called “officer-created jeopardy” was deemed inadmissible by Ohta last year.
The evidence might have been admissible under a change in California law passed in 2020, which lowered the standard for charging officers in fatal use-of-force cases, but it did not apply retroactively, Hochman said.
“These are difficult cases. The fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean we won’t bring them when they are appropriate,” Hochman said. “I’d say we probably spent hundreds of hours on the 12 seconds that were involved in the case.”
Hochman would not say directly if he believed the officers should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.
“What we’re saying is this would have been a potential charge for the grand jury to consider. I can’t tell you how the grand jury would have come out on it,” he said. “It certainly would have been something that was up for consideration.”
Chavez is no longer employed by the Torrance Police Department. Concannon remains on administrative leave. An agency spokesman declined to comment.
In the 2021 scandal, The Times uncovered messages that were replete with racial slurs and descriptions of violence against Black men and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
In one string of messages, officers used the N-word to describe Mitchell’s relatives and joked about what would happen after Concannon and Chavez’s names were made public.
“Gun cleaning Party at my house when they release my name??” one officer asked, according to a summary of the text messages made public in a 2022 court filing, which redacted the names of the officers sending the messages.
“Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another replied.
Lewis said in a letter to The Times that Concannon was “never a part of any text thread where an N-word was used to describe Mitchell’s family.”
Concannon and Chavez are the last officers connected to the scandal with pending cases.
Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic — whose criminal case led to the exposure of the scandal — struck a plea deal earlier this year to vandalism charges for spray painting a swastika on a car towed from a crime scene.
David Chandler, another officer investigated as part of the scandal, pleaded no contest earlier this month to assault charges for shooting a Black suspect in the back. Chandler will eventually see his case dismissed under the terms of the agreement.
All three officers had to give up their rights to be peace officers in California under the terms of their plea deals.
The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General’s office entered into an “enforceable” agreement to reform earlier this year.
