She was sitting in her car before dawn last month when a uniformed police officer in Las Cruces, New Mexico, accused her and her passenger of trespassing, then shouted commands laced with the F-word at her and threatened to arrest her, “tase” her and make her life “a living hell” if she didn’t comply with his plan to investigate.

Early in their roughly nine-minute encounter, the 45-year-old, who said she’d been visiting someone at the address, told the officer she was looking for her misplaced keys, footage from his body-worn camera shows. Then the woman, Teresa Gomez, and the officer discussed why she and the passenger were parked outside a public housing complex – a place he said the passenger was not supposed to be, his bodycam video shows; she was unaware of any visitor rules, she said several times.

After she was asked repeatedly to get out of her car, Gomez stood outside it for a while, answering some of the officer’s questions, the video shows. Her passenger was never asked to get out or questioned in a similar way.

The grandmother eventually found her car keys and, with the officer’s permission, sat back in the driver’s seat, according to the video and a federal lawsuit her family filed last week against the city, the police chief and three members of the police force.

Then a half-minute later, she engaged the engine and, with her car door still open, shifted into reverse, pulled back, then put it into drive, the video shows.

The officer, Felipe Hernandez, three times shouted, “Stop!”

Then, he fired multiple times, the video shows.

  • Alien Nathan Edward
    4•1 year ago

    Someone who did nothing wrong is dead. A bunch of other people who did nothing wrong are gonna pay out a massive lawsuit. The only person in this entire scenario who did anything wrong is going to get a long paid vacation for it.

    Later that same day, another officer from the Las Cruces Police Department would turn himself in on a voluntary manslaughter charge in the August 2022 fatal shooting of a Black man who had left a gas station without paying for a beer

    That’s right, on the very day one officer turned himself in for murder another officer from that same PD murdered this woman.

    There is no law in America. Death squads wander the streets doing violence randomly and with impunity. No one is ever safe from being shot by the police.