Former Modesto policeman should have faced trial for killing unarmed Trevor Seever | Opinion

If shooting to death a fleeing, unarmed man isn’t enough to bring a trigger-happy officer to trial, what is?

Former Modesto police officer Joseph Lamantia hunted down and killed Trevor Seever on Dec. 29, 2020. The troubled 29-year-old did not brandish a gun because he didn’t have one. Instead, he tried to flee, and Lamantia quickly opened fire.

Lamantia, who faced zero threat from Seever, used zero patience and zero compassion. Of all the options open to Lamantia when he spotted Seever — waiting for backup, requesting a K-9 unit or air support, following Seever, calling out to identify himself as a policeman, moving to set up a perimeter — Lamantia chose the most extreme and the most deadly.

But he won’t face a jury, because the judge in charge of Lamantia’s preliminary hearing instead bought the version of events utilized by Lamantia and too many bad police officers like him: the reasonable fear excuse.

Stanislaus Judge Carrie Stephens on Friday ruled that a reasonable officer might have done just what Lamantia did. After all, Seever’s family thought he had a gun, and knew he could be volatile. The family called for help, and Seever had shared dead-cop wishes on social media.

The decision reflects just how hard it is to hold officers accountable for killing people in desperate need of help, especially here in the Central Valley.

In her 16 years as Stanislaus District Attorney before retiring at year’s end, Birgit Fladager decided to bring charges against only one officer for an on-duty killing: Lamantia. All others, she declined to prosecute, inviting criticism from many for the perception of a chummy relationship between those who arrest and those who prosecute.

Modesto cop killed four

Fladager no doubt felt pressure in the case of Lamantia, who was fired from the Modesto Police Department a few weeks after Seever’s death and after this editorial board urged that Lamantia lose his job and face prosecution. The recommendation was based partly on Lamantia’s violent record. He was not a public servant.

Only 27% of law enforcement officers had fired their service weapons sometime in their career, the Pew Research Center found in a national survey. In an 11-year span, Lamantia shot five people, including one holding a spatula, and four of them died.

The Modesto Police Department no doubt considered that bloody history, and the city’s liability, when weighing and terminating Lamantia’s employment. But the judge on July 21 by law focused only on whether Lamantia should face trial for Seever’s manslaughter.

The Bee has shared frustration with the reluctance of Fladager to go after cops with the same gusto she went after others so accused, as well as with her successor, current District Attorney Jeff Laugero.

For example, Fladager refused to charge Stanislaus deputies summoned by a false burglary alarm who escalated a 2020 confrontation with homeless Eloy Gonzalez before killing him when he finally grabbed a hatchet as a K-9 attacked him. And Laugero declined to prosecute Modesto police officer Sam Muncy for killing in July 2022 an inebriated Paul Chavez Jr., who held a trailer hitch but never raised it. Both shootings were rash and needless.

As was the one that took Trevor Seever’s life.

Justice denied

Consider the message that Stephens’ Friday decision sends to the broader community. Inaccurate speculation about a person carrying a gun could lead to an unarmed person being shot to death. If that person is experiencing a mental health crisis, the chances of a deadly encounter with police increase exponentially.

Is this what we want?

Even when prosecutors bring charges against cops, they rarely stick. San Joaquin County jurors acquitted a Stanislaus deputy who lost patience with Modesto’s Evin Yadegar, who was clearly in a mental health crisis when she was killed trying to put distance between herself and authorities after a slow-speed car chase in 2017. Her survivors won a $7 million settlement from the county, but the man who pulled the trigger went free.

And now we have Seever, whose survivors won a $7.5 million civil rights settlement with the city in April. The man who killed him, Lamantia, won’t even go to trial. A jury might have decided his fate in an orderly, lawful proceeding that would have provided Seever’s family a sense that their loved one’s life was worth something.

Instead, they lost both a loved one and any sense of justice.