Emotion, tears as trial begins over Sacramento police shooting of Darell Richards

One juror clasped her hand over her mouth as lawyers played a video of Sacramento police shooting Darell Richards to death four years ago.

Richards’ mother had to leave the courtroom twice choking back tears as details of her son’s death played out. And his older sister broke down on the witness stand before answering the first question she was asked.

In an emotionally charged session Thursday, lawyers for the Richards family began their wrongful death lawsuit against the city in Sacramento federal court in a trial that is expected to go on for weeks.

Adante Pointer, one of three lawyers for the 19-year-old Richards’ mother, Khoua Vang, and father, Ted Richards Jr., called the events that led to Richards being shot 10 times by police a “botched SWAT operation” that cost Richards his life in the backyard of a Curtis Park home on Sept. 6, 2018.

“That life was cut short because these defendants ... they failed in their duty,” Pointer told the four-man, four-woman jury in his opening statement. “They failed in their duty to the public, to the department and to Darell and his family.”

Richards was shot by two officers who said he pointed a handgun at another officer after leading police on a manhunt from Broadway and 16th Street to 20th Street and First Avenue. The weapon turned out to be a pellet gun he had purchased the same day from a sporting goods store.

Pointer told jurors that Richards was shot by two SWAT team members — Officers Patrick Cox and Todd Edgerton — as he was starting to raise his hands in surrender, and that police violated department policy by not bringing in a crisis negotiation team to talk to the mentally troubled young man before opening fire.

“The defense rushed into this situation, and it cost Darell his life,” Pointer said before he played video from Cox’s body-worn camera of the shooting.

The jarring video left one juror wiping her eyes with a tissue, while Richards’ mother briefly left the courtroom in tears.

Pointer noted that an autopsy found that “Darell did not have a scintilla of drugs or alcohol in his body.”

The family is suing Cox and Edgerton, as well as Lt. Sameer Sood, the watch commander that night, and former Chief Daniel Hahn over the shooting.

Only Hahn was not present in Senior U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez’ courtroom Thursday, but Richards’ attorneys - Pointer, Melissa Nold and Patrick Buelna — say they plan to call Hahn as a witness “regarding his failure to supervise the department.”

After Pointer finished his 30-minute opening statement, Sean Richmond, senior deputy city attorney for Sacramento, got his turn, telling jurors the shooting was tragic but that “the evidence will show that it was unquestionably reasonable.”

“It is a horrible tragedy that a young man’s life was lost,” Richmond said. “Nobody wanted that result.”

But, Richmond said, police had been searching for Richards for hours after receiving reports of an armed man pointing a weapon at people downtown, and that when confronted and ordered to show his hands he pointed the handgun at Officer Barry Tiner.

That threat required Cox and Edgerton to fire to protect Tiner, Richmond said.

Richmond showed jurors a photo of the pellet gun Richards was carrying, and noted that it is manufactured to “look precisely” like an authentic Sig Sauer handgun.

“It was within policy for them to shoot at that time,” Richmond said. “Why? Because they perceived an immediate lethal threat from Darell.”

Richmond disputed Pointer’s argument that police should have brought in a negotiating team to talk to Richards, saying officers did not know where he was until he was discovered in the backyard of a home and shot a short time later.

“The crisis negotiating team can only be effectively utilized if they know where the person is that they are looking for,” Richmond said. “You have to know where the person is to enter into this dialogue.”

The Richards shooting came six months after Sacramento police shot and killed another young black man, Stephon Clark, who they said they believed had pointed a handgun at them in the dark backyard of his grandparents’ home.

Clark was carrying only a cellphone, and his death sparked massive protests and national media coverage, as well as a host of police reforms in California.

The Richards incident began about 11:30 on Sept. 5, 2018, when Richards pointed a black handgun at two Tower Cafe workers who were walking away from the restaurant on Broadway after their shifts, and a third worker who saw it called 911, according to a District Attorney’s Office review of the case.

“Richards was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a white design, a mask covering the lower portion of his face, sunglasses, and a backpack,” the D.A.’s report said, and after he pointed the handgun at the two men he began walking east on Broadway toward the light rail station near 21st Street.

Officer Joseph Tibbets spotted Richards at 11:38 p.m., and when he turned on his patrol car lights Richards dropped his backpack and ran, eventually climbing over the fence of a home on 20th Street.

A second officer, Stephen Sanguinetti, saw Richards climb over a fence and walk down an alley, then try to climb another fence as the officer shouted, “Let me see your hands!” and “Get on the ground!,” the report said.

Sanguinetti saw a gun in Richards’ hand and radioed that information to dispatchers, and two SWAT team members, Edgerton and Cox, arrived at the scene at 12:13 a.m. and began searching for Richards with a K-9 helping.

At 3:12 a.m., Cox spotted Richards under a stairwell wearing a surgical mask, and he and Tiner ordered him to drop the weapon, according to the D.A.

“Sergeant Edgerton and Officer Cox believed Richards was going to shoot his gun at them or Officer Tiner, so both fired their .223 caliber rifles at Richards,” The D.A. report said. “Richards fell down on his right side.”

Richards died at the scene from gunshot wounds to his left temple, right hand, his left arm, forearm and fingers and his left leg. Officers later recovered 16 .223-caliber shell casings from the area, according to the D.A. report, which concluded the shooting “was lawful” and said police found a “black pellet gun that resembled a SIG Sauer handgun” in his lap.

The family’s lawsuit says police had recovered Richards’ backpack before they began the search that led to his shooting, and that they knew it contained a receipt from Big 5 Sporting Goods for a pellet gun purchased earlier, as well as information identifying Richards and “possible suicide note.”

The Richards family lawyers and city disagree over whether the note was a suicide note or, possibly, an old homework assignment.

“The Defendant Officers made no efforts to contact and/or involve Darell Richards’ family, despite knowing his identity, address and potential for self-harm,” the suit says

The suit contends police had three hours to determine Richards likely was not carrying a real firearm and was mentally troubled, but took no action to defuse the situation.

“The police had made no attempts whatsoever to contact him,” the suit says. “Inexplicably, none of the officers on scene attempted to make contact with Darell, despite knowing his name and that he wrote a suicide note and was carrying a pellet gun.

“Moreover, none of the officers on scene attempted to contact Darell’s family, despite knowing that he had recent police contact where the family informed officers they suspected the police contact was due to a mental illness. Furthermore, none of the officers on scene attempted to contact Darell via his cell phone or social media accounts or issue Darell any commands or orders to surrender.

“Perhaps most egregious, none of the officers on scene identified themselves as police officers or warned Darell that they intended to deploy a police K-9 into the yard.”

Body camera footage police released after the shooting did not definitively show Richards point the pellet gun at officers, and police said one of the officers’ cameras had been turned off accidentally.

The first witness to testify Thursday was Richards’ older sister, Marlena Lee, who broke down at the first question from Pointer when he asked who Darell Richards was.

“Darell was my brother,” she said through tears, then wiped her face with tissue from the witness stand.

Lee said the two were among seven siblings, and that she “was like his second mother.”

“I cooked for him, watched him, I was always there when he needed me,” she said. “He was always there for me.”

She described Richards as the “family peacemaker,” but said that her brother began to change noticeably around the time he turned 17, getting into fights with a younger brother, isolating himself and no longer calling her.

He ended up in the Sacramento County Jail because of one of the disputes, and when she went to visit him there weeks before the shooting he had a “blank stare in his eyes.”

“It was like he barely blinked,” she said. “It was like he was looking right through me.”

Lee said she left the visit and began to research what could be wrong, and discovered he might be schizophrenic, which led to two family meetings with him after he was bailed out of the jail.

“At first he was in denial, and he was upset,” she said. “He was just, ‘No, this isn’t right, I’m not crazy.’”

Finally, after working with his public defender and calling doctors repeatedly, she said she managed to find someone who would do a mental evaluation on Richards.

She got a voicemail from a medical provider asking to schedule the appointment, she said. It came in the week after he died.