‘Consequences across the board’: Criminal case dismissals mount amid Antioch police scandals
The dismissals come amid the discovery of reams of racist texts shared between officers
THE ANTIOCH – A week after eight Antioch police officers were indicted on federal and state charges, Contra Costa County’s criminal justice system is collapsing under the weight of unprecedented allegations of racism and corruption within the police force: dozens of criminal cases have already been dismissed, and thousands more are being reviewed.
The widespread smear on East Contra Costa law enforcement has resulted in the unraveling of murder and other serious cases, while people imprisoned on the word of officers accused of harboring racist views and violating civil rights are being released or having their charges dropped.
There are already shocking examples: Two men were released earlier this year after being accused of stuffing 25-year-old Mykaella Sharlman into a garbage can and setting her body on fire last October, amid growing concerns about the integrity of Antioch police officers. Prosecutors may refile felony arson and mutilation of a corpse charges, but doing so may necessitate re-creating the police investigation because the Antioch detectives behind the investigation were involved in racist group chats.
The ordeal, and others like it, have left crime victims and their families seeking justice.
“How do you let someone walk away from the way they burned and mutilated my sister’s body and threw her in a garbage can?” Mia Sharlman, Sharlman’s 40-year-old sister, agreed. “We are not the only family, and it hurts because it makes you wonder, ‘Why? Why us?'”
Meanwhile, newly released defendants say they feel vindicated and relieved after their cases were dismissed in the wake of the discovery of reams of racist text messages sent and received by nearly half of the Antioch Police Department’s officers. Furthermore, some of the same officers are accused of using K9s on people at random and shooting residents with foam bullets for fun, while targeting people to abuse because of their race.
“When it comes to someone like me, I’m brown, I come from that area, we’re already a stereotype,” said Amadeo Garcia Jr., 46, who has sued Antioch alleging police illegally searched his car and that officers may have planted the drugs after prosecutors dropped drug charges against him in May. “I thought I was going to be in prison for a long time.”
As trust between the community and its police force deteriorates, prosecutors handling any case out of Antioch are likely to face a significantly more difficult time obtaining convictions.
“The system is built on trust, and we have to be able to trust our police officers to act fairly and honestly,” said Tom Kensok, a Contra Costa County prosecutor for 30 years. “They clearly failed in terms of acting in an unjust manner toward people.” And (the officers) created the right impression, based on the texts, that people would not be treated fairly.”
“And once that foundation collapses, things go into free fall,” he added.
The dismissals date back to at least March 2022, when federal prosecutors dismissed more than a dozen cases – many of them firearms-related – that hinged on the word of Antioch officers under investigation by the FBI at the time for “crimes of moral turpitude,” which led to 13 Antioch and Pittsburg officers being charged last week on charges ranging from savage civil rights violations to cheating on training classes to distributing steroids.
The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office dismissed another 40 or so cases that summer.
However, the revelation this spring that roughly half of Antioch’s police force had either sent or received racist text messages raised the prospect of thousands of additional cases, potentially dwarfing anything seen in California’s history.
The scope is such that Contra Costa County’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved spending $2.2 million to hire ten attorneys – five for the district attorney’s and five for the public defender’s offices – to review cases for possible wrongdoing by Antioch officers.
Previous instances of a large number of cases being reviewed for dismissal have typically involved dysfunctional crime labs or other scandals involving racist texts exchanged between police officers. But not on this scale, according to Terry Wiley, a former Alameda County prosecutor who oversaw the criminal prosecution of Oakland police officers in the infamous Riders scandal more than two decades ago.
“In some cases, the damage is irreversible.” People in Contra Costa County will lose a lot of trust in the criminal justice system,” Wiley predicted. “At some point, the city of Antioch and the county must sit down and discuss whether the Antioch Police Department should be maintained for the sake of the criminal justice system and keeping the community safe.”
Many of the dismissed cases involved charges involving firearms or allegations of resisting or assaulting a police officer. Some, like Vance Gattis, have already served their time or accepted plea bargains on charges that are now being investigated. After a car stop in which Gattis was beaten, tased, and attacked by the dog, Purcy, whose handler Officer Morteza Amiri was indicted on civil rights violations, Gattis was charged with assaulting a police dog. Gattis took a plea deal after being charged with resisting arrest of Amiri, Officer Eric Rombough, and others.
Other cases, however, are far more serious.
A murder case against a juvenile accused of the 2021 freeway shooting death of India Prince, a 24-year-old woman caught in the crossfire of a suspected gang hit targeting her brother, who was riding next to her and was injured in the attack, was dropped just this month. Her 2-year-old son was in the back seat and escaped the July 24, 2021, attack on Highway 4 near Concord unharmed.
After a California Highway Patrol investigation, the teen was arrested and charged with murder a year later. However, charges in the case were dropped this month, according to a lawsuit filed by the teen, who claims Antioch police raided his family’s San Joaquin County home in July 2022 without a search warrant. Rombough, a gang unit and SWAT member, was among the Antioch police who sent texts that used the N-word and referred to Black people as “gorillas,” all while joking about “violating civil rights,” according to the lawsuit.
Rombough was charged with federal civil rights violations earlier this month.
The dropped charges validated the teenager’s mother’s conviction that officers wrongfully targeted her son without enough evidence to back it up.
“They need to rebuild from top to bottom – they all need to be swept through with a fine-toothed comb,” said Tiffaney Turner, the teen’s mother. When her house was raided, she claimed officers refused to show her a search warrant because “I watch too much TV.”
“It was a game – they were laughing at upending someone’s life, turning someone’s life upside down,” Turner continued.
However, Prince’s relatives cannot help but feel deeply wronged by the victim’s family.
“It’s very disheartening – you’re just putting them back on the streets to commit more crime,” said Shayla Jamerson, Prince’s aunt. “It’s a personal slap in the face for my family.”
“It’s just a very eerie feeling that the people who are supposed to protect and serve us, we can’t even trust them because they are also committing crimes,” she added.
The ramifications of so many dismissals are dizzying, according to Gigi Crowder, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Contra Costa County branch. The organization has begun to lead so-called “healing symposiums” to assist people in beginning to address the trauma caused by the policing scandal — whether it’s years of intimidation and abuse by police officers, or the agony of seeing no one held accountable for so many crimes.
“I’m not convinced that in every case, the person did not do it,” Crowder said. “You endanger the community if you’re so rogue as an officer that we have to dismiss cases where the person was possibly guilty.”
“But we also know that the cops were biased,” she continued. “When cops do bad things, there are consequences all around.”
