A jury found that
LAPD rookie Sergio Arreola was the victim of excessive force by two Pomona
officers. Arreola refused to resign or take a plea bargain, arguing that the
other officers were lying.
A jury has awarded a Los Angeles police officer $260,000 after finding that Pomona police used excessive force on the young cop and unlawfully arrested him.
The verdict reached
Wednesday evening was a final step in a nearly two-year effort by Sergio
Arreola to clear his name after the 2012 encounter that left him fired from the
LAPD and facing a possible prison sentence.
"This was
about showing the officers and showing Pomona that they can't be treating
others the way they treated me," Arreola, 27, said.
The Times first
wrote about Arreola's case last year as he was fighting to get his job back.
In the morning on
April 11, 2012, Arreola, who was then a rookie in the LAPD's Central Division,
finished a night shift on patrol and drove to Pomona to meet his wife. While on
the way, his wife called and asked Arreola to meet her in a nearby neighborhood
where a relative had gotten into a minor traffic accident.
Things spun out of
control quickly after Arreola arrived. Although Arreola identified himself as
an off-duty LAPD officer, within minutes he was on the ground with Pomona
officers piled on top of him, placing him in handcuffs.
One of the
officers, Eric Hamilton, said in his arrest report that Arreola was aggressive
and belligerent from the outset, refusing to obey the officer's commands.
Hamilton and another officer, Chris Tucker, described Arreola's demeanor as
"extremely angry." Tucker said in a report that when he tried to
handcuff Arreola, he "began to twist and tense up, pulling his arms from
our grasp." The officers alleged that Arreola tried to punch Hamilton in
the face as they restrained him.
Pomona police
officials notified Arreola's LAPD supervisors of the arrest and the account of
his behavior that Hamilton and Tucker had given. The next day, Arreola's
commanding officer called him into the station and gave him a choice to resign
or be fired.
He refused to
resign, saying that he had done none of the things the Pomona officers accused
him of doing.
Out of a job, things
worsened for Arreola when prosecutors in the Los Angeles County district
attorney's office charged him with three misdemeanors of resisting arrest,
assaulting Hamilton and obstructing the officers' work. They eventually dropped
the assault charge but refused to budge on the others. Arreola refused to
consider a guilty plea in exchange for a lenient sentence. "They've ruined
my life, they've ruined my name," he recalled saying to his attorney at
the time. "What's the worst they can do? Send me to jail?"
At his trial,
jurors heard a starkly different account of the morning than the one the
officers had told.
Arreola took the
stand to challenge the officers' allegations, saying that Hamilton had been the
aggressive one, cursing and yelling at him. He denied ever resisting the
officers, saying that Tucker had intentionally pulled him off balance while he
was being frisked and, when Arreola stumbled, the officer used it as an excuse
to take him to the ground.
In an audio
recording of the encounter captured by a recorder Hamilton carried, the officer
is heard telling Arreola repeatedly to "stop resisting" and Arreola
saying that he is not resisting. Arreola is also heard pleading with onlookers
to record the scene. Once on the ground, Arreola said, the officers punched him
repeatedly. Hamilton, he said, bent his left arm back violently and Tucker
attempted to subdue him by using a choke hold.
Later in the
recording, Hamilton told Arreola's wife, "I'm going to make sure your
husband is never a police officer in the state of California again. I'll talk
to Chief Beck myself personally," referring to the LAPD chief.
And jurors listened
as Hamilton and Tucker recounted the arrest for other officers. "I just
about broke his left arm. I wanted to break his arm," Hamilton said.
"I had my arm around him to choke his ass out," Tucker said.
The jury found
Arreola not guilty. After the acquittal, the LAPD offered Arreola his job back.
Pomona police
officials could not be reached for comment. It is unknown whether the
department has conducted an internal investigation into the conduct of Hamilton
and Tucker.
Matthew McNicholas,
Arreola's attorney in the civil case, said that although the jury did not award
Arreola as much money as he had hoped, the verdict sent a message.
"The jury saw
these officers beat him, just abused him intentionally. They took everything
away from him…. This verdict completes Sergio's vindication."
