The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office on Friday, Nov. 21, announced it had filed to dismiss a case against two then-Torrance police officers who shot and killed a 23-year-old Black man sitting in a reportedly stolen car with a modified air rifle between his legs in 2018.
The Police Department has said the suspect moved his hands toward what appeared to be a firearm.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman said his office did not believe it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt a charge of voluntary manslaughter against Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez in the fatal shooting of Christopher Deandre Mitchell.
A judge did not make a ruling Friday on the motion and the case was continued possibly to next week, Hochman said.
The district attorney pointed to the timing of the case being filed, saying that by the time a special prosecutor hired by previous District Attorney George Gascon had presented a case to a grand jury, it was past the three-year statute of limitations for a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which would have required a jury to find Concannon and Chavez reckless and unreasonable when they fired the shots.
Voluntary manslaughter, Hochman said, requires a jury to find the defendant had an intent to kill when they fired.
Officer Matthew Concannon and former Officer Anthony Chavez had been cleared during the initial investigation by the District Attorney’s Office when Jackie Lacey headed it, and then charges were filed during the term of her successor, George Gascón.
And now District Attorney Nathan Hochman is trying to again change the case’s course.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison. Both officers pleaded not guilty in the case; Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, 23, was killed outside a Ralphs in Old Torrance.
Following his death, there were protests by Black Lives Matter activists. In 2023, the charges by Gascón’s office.
At the time, during a news conference, Mitchell’s mother, Sherlyn Haynes, said she looked forward to the two officers going to jail.
“They murdered my son within 15 seconds, didn’t give him no chance, no chance at all,” she said.
At the time, attorneys for the two officers countered that the prosecution was politically motivated and an abuse of prosecutorial power.
On the night of Dec. 9, 2018, Mitchell, 23, was in the parking lot of a Carson Street supermarket in Old Torrance, sitting in the driver’s seat of a car that had been reported as stolen. Between his legs was a Crosman Phantom 1000 air rifle with a modified butt stock.
Officers went to the car and told him to keep his hands on the steering wheel, but, according to a previous report by prosecutors who cleared police, at one point he moved them toward his lap.
The officers fired total of three shots at Mitchell. Body-cam video captured at least some of the confrontation, although it was dark. There were 12 seconds from when the officer activated his camera as he opened the car door to the first shot.
“Based on Mitchell’s failure to follow the officers’ directions, his continued efforts to conceal the object in his lap, the physical appearance of the object, and the movement of his hands toward the object, it was reasonable for the officers to believe that the object was a firearm and to respond with deadly force,” that District Attorney’s Office report says.