Two Long Beach police officers who killed an unarmed man during a 39-bullet barrage in 2013 have lost their appeal to escape $2.9 million in liability.
Following a report in the Weekly, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit this week backed a judge and jury’s findings against officers John B. Fagan and Daniel A. Martinez in the death of 19-year-old Tyler Woods.
The cops claimed they believed Woods, who’d fled a traffic stop, had been on the verge of trying to shoot them, but the panel determined there was “ample evidence” the deceased “posed no immediate threat” to the cops or the surrounding community when he was executed.
Nineteen of the 39 bullets struck Woods, including six which individually would have been fatal.
Calling the moves “reasonable,” the panel accepted the jury’s finding that the officers “acted with deliberate indifference” to Woods life as well as U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips’ refusal to overturn the verdicts.
You can read our story about the killing HERE.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.