The City of Santa Ana and its police department will pay more than $1 million to get a pre-trial settlement with the minor daughter and son of an unarmed, innocent North Carolina visitor killed by police in 2010.
This week, U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton Tucker approved the wrongful death settlement a month before the scheduled trial in Santa Ana's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
Andres Ramirez, the 21-year-old father who was born in Santa Ana but moved out of state at 7, was walking in a neighborhood just after 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2010, when police gang officers Michael Heitmann and Frank Gutierrez ordered him to stop.
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Ramirez, who'd done nothing wrong, complied and was standing with his
hands up when one of the officers approached from behind and fired a
fatal bullet into the back of his head, according to the
lawsuit. He was pronounced officially dead the next day.
In the
aftermath of the killing, police officials told reporters that Ramirez
had tried to attack them with knife and had been shot in the chest.
But
according to Ramirez family attorney James F. Rumm, the police version
of event was a “blatantly false” attempt to cover up the illegal killing.
In
his lawsuit, Rumm–a lawyer with Orange-based Douglas, Lopez &
Rumm–claimed that the “intentional [and] reckless killing” represented a
“far reaching and overly aggressive enforcement” policy by the Santa
Ana Police Department.
Based on the settlement it's obvious that
Santa Ana officials feared that a future Orange County jury might award
Ramirez's children a substantially larger financial award.
According
to the terms of the settlement arranged through a mediator,
the two surviving children will collect $800,000 and Rumm will get $206,520 in lawyer fees and
costs
Rumm originally demanded $20 million as a settlement at the outset of the case.
Susan Kang Schroeder, chief of staff at the Orange County District Attorney's office, tells me that prosecutors are reviewing whether criminal charges should be filed against the officers.
Ironically, officers Heitmann and Gutierrez had been featured on “America's Most Wanted” as brave heroes months before the Ramirez killing.
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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.