About five years after Jonathan LaRoche resigned from the El Cajon Police Department over multiple uses of excessive force against intoxicated individuals — and about a year after he lied about that misconduct on his application to become a Navy detective — he choked unconscious an intoxicated and handcuffed sailor at Naval Base San Diego.
The victim “appeared to be within inches of his life,” U.S. District Judge John Houston said Wednesday during a sentencing hearing in San Diego federal court. “He was very close to death.”
Citing a need to send a strong message of deterrence to other police officers, and noting the racial aspects of a case involving a White officer and Black victim, Houston sentenced LaRoche to 15 months in federal prison, nearly double what prosecutors recommended.
“It’s disgusting. It’s violent. It’s extremely disturbing,” Houston told the defendant, who agreed as part of his plea deal to never seek another law enforcement job.
LaRoche, a 41-year-old Spring Valley resident, pleaded guilty last year to federal charges of making a false statement and depriving the sailor of his rights under the color of law. He admitted that while applying in 2022 for a detective job with the Department of the Navy’s Criminal Investigations Division, he made false statements under penalty of perjury about his reason for leaving the El Cajon Police Department and his disciplinary history.
He also admitted that in November 2023 in a security building on Naval Base San Diego, he placed the intoxicated and handcuffed sailor in a carotid restraint for 17 seconds until the victim lost consciousness. He admitted that several minutes later, when the victim was sitting handcuffed to a bench, he grabbed him by the throat and pushed his head against a wall.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Askins told the judge Wednesday that LaRoche only stopped shoving the man’s head when a supervisor intervened, and that he later bragged to a colleague that he “got to choke someone out.”
Askins said LaRoche needlessly inserted himself into the situation that other officers had under control and that he also lifted the sailor off the ground by his neck at one point after choking him unconscious and struck him with his fists and elbows multiple times.
The prosecutor said it’s understood that law enforcement officers sometimes make mistakes in split-second decisions. “That’s not this case,” Askins told the judge.
LaRoche told Houston that he was “unbelievably sorry for what happened.” He said he had untreated anger issues and post-traumatic stress disorder from serving three combat tours in Iraq with the Marine Corps. He said he addressed those issues not with professional help, but with alcohol and obsessing over work.
“It was go as fast and as hard as possible and put bad guys in jail, until I became one,” LaRoche told the judge.
After leaving the Marine Corps, LaRoche worked as an El Cajon police officer from 2013 to 2018. The department issued him a five-year reprimand in 2015 for using excessive force against an intoxicated man, with prosecutors writing in sentencing documents that an investigator noted at the time LaRoche had already been involved in eight use-of-force incidents in less than two years.
El Cajon police officials decided to terminate LaRoche in 2018 after concluding that he’d again used excessive force on two occasions in 2017. In those incidents, the department also concluded he improperly turned off his body-worn camera and lied, according to prosecutors. Instead of going through with firing him, department officials allowed him to resign.
Houston criticized that decision by El Cajon. “You got a pass,” the judge told LaRoche. “(And then) you lied your way into the (Navy) job and set yourself up to harm someone else.”
LaRoche was originally set to be sentenced in December, but Houston — a former federal prosecutor and Army reservist who began his legal career in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps — expressed concern that Askins’s eight-month recommended sentence was not severe enough.
Askins again recommended eight months in custody on Wednesday, arguing it was in line with two Customs and Border Protection officers sentenced in recent years for similar conduct. But Houston said LaRoche’s conduct was worse, and 15 months was appropriate. LaRoche waived his right to appeal the sentence as part of his plea deal.