It was a tragic police shooting, captured on body worn cameras, that sparked a debate about excessive force and mental health.
Three fired SAPD officers go on trial this week, two of them for murder, in the death of Melissa Perez in 2023.
The News 4 I-Team investigates whether the dismissal of a recent civil case against the officers could impact the criminal trial.
Melissa Perez’s daughter sued the three officers and the city in a civil case that was dismissed by a federal judge last month.
He found the officers’ “split second decision to shoot” was not “an unreasonable use of deadly force.”
The 46-year-old woman was suffering a schizophrenic episode. After speaking to officers outside, Perez abruptly walked back to her apartment. One officer tried to reach through a window to unlock a patio door, but Perez came toward him with a hammer.
“You’re going to get shot,” the officer could be heard shouting at Perez.
“Shoot me,” the woman responded through the open window.
After trying to talk Perez out, the officers claimed they decided to go in because the hammer posed a threat to Perez’s friend who was bedridden inside the apartment.
According to the civil case they discussed non-lethal weapons but instead decided to try and grab Perez when she set the hammer down on a nearby couch.
All three officers fired their weapons after Perez picked up the hammer and charged.
The officers were fired. Sgt. Alfred Flores and Officer Eleazor Alejandro are charged with murder. Officer Nathaniel Villalobos, who fired his gun but did not hit Perez, is charged with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon by a Public Servant.
“I was heartbroken watching it, almost in disbelief, I couldn’t believe that was my mom,” said Perez’s daughter Alexis Tovar.
Tovar says she wants to appeal the civil case and hopes this month’s criminal trial will bring accountability.
“She would have been here today if they wouldn’t have shot and killed her. I feel like she needed help and instead of helping her they killed her,” Tovar told News 4.
SAPD and prosecutors concluded Perez did not pose a threat to the officers because there was a locked door between them.
But the federal magistrate judge in the dismissed civil case wrote: “. . . the presence of a glass door between Perez and the Officer Defendants does not make the use of deadly force excessive.”
Patrick Hancock is a defense attorney who is not involved in this case, but who has defended other officers after shootings.
“If it wasn’t excessive force then I think that federal finding should cause the DA to go back and review the case and perhaps take it back to the grand jury,” Hancock said.
That, of course, has not happened and the case is set for jury selection Thursday.
Since the shooting, SAPD has expanded its CORE program which sends a specially trained police officer, paramedic and licensed clinician to help defuse incidents where someone is having a mental health crisis.