{"id":75590,"date":"2025-07-19T14:35:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T14:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/75590\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T14:35:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T14:35:15","slug":"ex-philadelphia-police-officer-who-fatally-shot-motorist-gets-parole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/75590\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot motorist gets parole"},"content":{"rendered":"

PHILADELPHIA (AP) \u2014 A former Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a motorist<\/a> during a traffic stop was sentenced and granted parole Thursday by a judge, eliciting condemnations from the city\u2019s district attorney and the victim\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

Judge Glenn Bronson sentenced Mark Dial to 9 1\/2 months in jail, and immediately granted Dial parole because he had already been jailed for 10 months following his arrest in 2023.<\/p>\n

A jury in May acquitted Dial<\/a>, 29, of murder charges, and instead convicted him of voluntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and possessing an instrument of crime in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry.<\/p>\n

Brian McMonagle, Dial\u2019s lawyer, said the judge did the right thing for a \u201cdedicated public servant\u201d who \u201crisked his life every day for perfect strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n

District Attorney Larry Krasner said the judge went \u201cway below\u201d sentencing guidelines in handing down a sentence that set Dial free. The low end of the standard range of sentencing guidelines for the conviction was 4 1\/2 to nine years in prison, he said.<\/p>\n

Krasner declined to criticize the judge but said he was \u201cdeeply disappointed with a verdict that I think makes people lose faith in the criminal justice system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zoraida Garcia, an aunt of Irizarry\u2019s, told reporters after the sentencing that if she had committed the crime, \u201cI would have been doing life in prison. But he\u2019s a cop, so he gets the OK.\u201d Another aunt, Ana Cintron, said, \u201cmy nephew\u2019s life doesn\u2019t matter at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

In court, Bronson said the shooting was not \u201ca classic voluntary manslaughter case,\u201d that Dial\u2019s conduct was \u201cdemonstrably out of character\u201d and that Dial was not a threat to the public, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He also said that Dial, after shooting Irizarry six times, rushed Irizarry to the hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen that happen in a voluntary manslaughter case,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Dial\u2019s lawyers have insisted that the 2023 shooting was justified.<\/p>\n

They say Dial thought Irizarry had a gun when he approached Irizarry\u2019s car after officers spotted the car being driven erratically and followed it for several blocks before it turned the wrong way down a one-way street and stopped.<\/p>\n

Police body camera video of the shooting shows Dial getting out of a police SUV, striding over to Irizarry\u2019s car and firing his weapon six times at close range through the rolled-up driver\u2019s side window.<\/p>\n

The video shows Irizarry holding a seven-inch knife before he was shot.<\/p>\n

Another officer yelled \u201cknife\u201d as they had approached the vehicle, according to the video, but Dial\u2019s attorneys disputed those assertions, saying the other officer yelled \u201cGun!,\u201d that the knife resembled a gun and that Dial had acted lawfully and in self-defense.<\/p>\n

Dial was released from custody in 2024 after prosecutors withdrew a first-degree murder charge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (AP) \u2014 A former Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a motorist during a traffic stop…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":75591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,50,1448,2830,15273,1311,20348,52564,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-75590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-pa","11":"tag-pennsylvania","12":"tag-pennsylvania-news","13":"tag-philadelphia","14":"tag-philadelphia-county","15":"tag-top-stories-rhr","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114880402265015100","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}