California school safety officer pleads no contest to voluntary manslaughter in fatal shooting of 18-year-old

(CNN) — A former California school safety officer has pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter nearly three years after he was charged with murder for fatally shooting an 18-year-old woman as she tried to flee a physical altercation, officials said Tuesday.

Eddie Gonzalez is scheduled to be sentenced on October 8 and faces either three or six years in prison, Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office spokesperson Pamela J. Johnson told CNN.

The plea comes about four months after a mistrial was declared in the murder trial against Gonzalez, after the jury failed to reach a verdict.

Gonzalez was patrolling an area near Millikan High School in Long Beach on September 27, 2021, when he noticed a fight between Manuela Rodriguez, 18, and a 15-year-old girl, the police said. As Rodriguez and two others attempted to flee the scene in a nearby vehicle, the school safety officer allegedly fired his handgun at the sedan, striking Rodriguez, who was in the front passenger seat, police said.

Rodriguez was taken to a hospital and died from her injuries approximately a week later, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said. She left behind a 5-month-old son.

Gonzalez was soon fired for violating the district’s use-of-force policy, which instructs its safety officers not to shoot at a fleeing person, moving vehicle or through a vehicle window unless “circumstances clearly warrant the use of a firearm as a final means of defense,” the policy states. He was charged with murder a month after the shooting.

“We must hold accountable the people we have placed in positions of trust to protect us,” District Attorney George Gascon said about the charge. “That is especially true for the armed personnel we traditionally have relied upon to guard our children on their way to and from and at school.”

Last year, Rodriguez’s family reached a $13 million settlement agreement with the Long Beach Unified School District in their civil case. The Long Beach Unified School District had said the agreement was not an “admission of liability.”

“I don’t know how to go on, how I’m here, how to move on without my baby girl. She meant everything to me,” her mother Manuela Sahagun said at the time. “All I want is justice – justice for my baby girl.”

In April, seven of the jurors wanted to convict Gonzalez on the murder charge, while five jurors wanted to convict him on a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office told CNN.

CNN has reached out to Gonzalez’s attorney for comment.

The case against Gonzalez comes amid debate in US school districts about whether armed officers should be present in schools. Some say the law enforcement presence helps protect students against gun violence, while others worry about police misconduct and an acceleration of the school-to-prison pipeline.

In an effort to prevent school shootings in California, a bill introduced earlier this year that failed passage would have required K-12 schools statewide to have at least one armed officer. Currently, California law allows school districts to decide whether to employ or contract for armed law enforcement officers or unarmed security officers.

Meanwhile, others have run local campaigns in California school districts to remove school police, who they say are far more likely to target Black and Latino students.

The American Civil Liberties Union of California in 2021 released a report warning that having more police officers at public schools could have a detrimental effect on students. The study found that Latino students’ arrest rates were 6.9 times higher and Black students’ arrest rates were 7.4 times higher in schools with assigned law enforcement than in schools without. It also found that the groups were more likely to be referred to law enforcement.

A report published in July by the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that approximately 45% of US public schools reported having sworn law enforcement officers who routinely carried a firearm.

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