A Tustin police officer will face no criminal charges for the fatal shooting of a man who was holding a wooden pole and a bag of empty cans and bottles, the California Department of Justice said.
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The report on the death of Luis Manuel Garcia-Arias, 39, was issued Tuesday in accordance with a law that requires a state investigation of any shooting by a California law enforcement officer that kills a person who was not carrying a deadly weapon.
In the case of Garcia-Arias, the police had been called on the morning of Aug. 9, 2021, by a resident who said there was an unhoused person outside her mobile home park and that the previous day she had seen him holding a knife.
Three officers arrived at 10:14 a.m. and a fourth within about a minute. Officer Estela Silva took the lead in the encounter, approaching a man who was lying, apparently asleep, in a planting area where a 7-foot-tall hedge abutted a brick wall.
The officers later reported that the man resisted Silva’s commands to come out from behind the bush. After about a minute of conversation between Silva and Garcia-Arias, most of it in Spanish, he stepped out onto the sidewalk. In addition to a plastic bag of cans and bottles (“I’m collecting recyclables,” he had said earlier), he was holding a wooden pole — about 5 feet long and 1¼ inches in diameter — in a vertical position.
One of the officers deployed his Taser, and Silva fired her handgun twice from a distance of 3 to 5 feet. Both shots struck Garcia-Arias in the chest.
Silva later said she believed the pole was metal, and “when he held it up as a baseball bat, I thought he was gonna bash my face in.”
The Department of Justice’s report concludes: “The evidence does not show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Officer Silva acted without the intent to defend herself or other officers from what she reasonably believed to be an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. Therefore, there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution of Officer Silva.”
Silva had been a police officer for two years at the time and previously worked in parking enforcement. She told investigators she had twice before encountered Garcia-Arias in situations where he was aggressive.
A relative told a Los Angeles Times reporter that Garcia-Arias, the father of two girls, had mental issues that worsened when he was living on the street. She said he used the wooden pole in collecting recyclable containers to redeem for cash.
The Department of Justice report pointed out three elements of the case that investigators said warranted re-examination of the Tustin Police Department’s practices and policies:
• Use of body cameras. Silva was not wearing hers, and one of the three other officers failed to turn his on.
• De-escalation tactics. “The officers did not formulate a plan” before confronting the man in the bushes, and “Officer Silva’s tone and conduct throughout the interaction were inconsistent with de-escalation,” the report said.
• Communication after the shooting. In a deviation from the department’s policy, Silva was not sequestered from the other officers in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in fact rode back to the station with one of them.
The report is the sixth issued under the law that took effect in July 2021. The five other reports also determined that no criminal charges against an officer were warranted.
As of March 2024, the state’s attorney general had called for investigations of 54 fatal shootings by law enforcement officers.
Luis Manuel Garcia-Arias was confronted by police as he lay behind a hedge next to the sidewalk.