San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office confirmed Monday she is dismissing charges against former San Francisco Police officer Kenneth Cha, who fatally shot Sean Moore at his home in 2017. Her predecessor, Chesa Boudin, had filed voluntary manslaughter charges against Cha in 2021.

“It’s awful,” Cleo Moore, Sean Moore’s mother, told KQED. “He killed him. And I can’t change that.”

However, Jenkins said she could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Cha did not act in self-defense. In her explanation for dropping Moore’s case (PDF), Jenkins pointed to the fact that former District Attorney George Gascón did not originally prosecute Cha when he was in office. Boudin, once he took over the DA role, did later file charges against the officer. Jenkins has said Boudin took on the police shooting case for “political reasons."

Jenkins has now dropped all three police shooting cases that Boudin initially filed.

“Mr. Moore’s subsequent death, tragic as it is, did not change the analysis, which is grounded in the events that occurred at the time of the incident,” Jenkins said in an email to KQED. “At this time we draw the same conclusion that was explained in the declination under Gascón, and can not ethically prosecute this case in good faith.”

Mission Local first reported Jenkins’ decision on Sunday.

Moore, 46, was in his Ocean View apartment on Jan. 6, 2017, when police knocked on his front gate to respond to a neighbor’s noise complaint. He yelled at the officers to leave, and when he finally opened the gate and stood at the top of the stairs, officers yelled at him to get to the ground. Moore refused, and Cha’s partner struck Moore with a baton just before Cha shot Moore twice.

Moore had been struggling with mental health challenges, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and appeared aggravated when officers responded to the neighbor’s complaint, according to video footage.

He died of his injuries three years later, while serving an unrelated sentence at San Quentin State Prison. The cause of death was found to be an obstruction in his stomach related to scar tissue from the earlier gunshot wound.

[Bolding added throughout]

Lot of things to talk about there (like how Boudin prosecuting police for their crimes was political but this prosecutor dropping every single case against them totally isn’t), but one question that jumps out at me - what kind of medical care was this guy getting in prison where he could die from a stomach obstruction?