• Doug HollandOP
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    71 year ago

    Thanks for asking. I didn’t find the answer, but digging just an inch deeper, the facts in an earlier article are even more disgusting:

    Vallejo officer fired for shooting, killing Sean Monterrosa has termination overturned

        Tonn and two other officers were responding to alleged reports of looting at the store in an unmarked pickup truck. Body camera footage shows Tonn, who is seated in the backseat of the vehicle, stick an AR-15-style assault rifle in between the two officers and fire five times through the windshield at Monterrosa as the police vehicle approached the store.
        Monterrosa died a short time later.
        Vallejo police have alleged that Tonn fired at Monterrosa because he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt pocket for the butt of a gun.
        The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta in May 2021 opened an investigation into the shooting, but there have been no updates in that case and Bonta’s office will not comment on open cases.
        Tonn was at first placed on administrative leave for the shooting death, but was fired in 2021 by then-Chief Shawny Williams, who determined that Monterrosa was on his knees with his hands raised when he was shot.
        … Tonn had previously shot three people over five years in Vallejo while on duty, none of which were found to have had firearms, a tenth of the 32 total shootings by the department in one decade, according to attorney Ben Nisenbaum.
        Vallejo civil rights attorney Melissa Nold, who represents families of people killed by Vallejo police, said the decision to bring back Tonn had been in the works the minute he was terminated by Williams.
        “Unfortunately, I am not surprised at this troubling turn of events because a whistleblower notified me last year via email that Tonn was working a deal to get his job back once they threatened and ran off Chief Williams,” Nold said.
        Williams resigned abruptly last November. Williams was repeatedly criticized by the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association, the offices’ union, which had previously voted “no confidence” in him and blamed him for everything from attrition to high crime in the city. But advocates for the families of those killed by police said Williams had been making progress in cleaning up a department that had gained international attention for being violent. During Williams’ tenure, there were no police shootings after the Monterrosa death.
        Nold places part of the blame on Tonn’s return on the city, which she said “made no effort” to support his termination. Nold said they are still expecting Bonta to file criminal charges against Tonn and there will be a push to get him decertified as an officer as well.
        “He cannot ever go back out onto the streets of Vallejo,” she said. “The liability he would create by being here is astronomical, but sadly no one in the city attorney’s office is smart enough to understand and/or are too corrupt and rotten to care.”
        In May, a Solano County judge found that the Vallejo City Attorney’s Office broke the law by deliberately destroying evidence in cases related to police shootings.
        The city of Vallejo did not respond to a request for comment. …