RICHMOND — The California Department of Justice has released the names of two Richmond cops who shot and killed a man in February when he allegedly charged at them with an empty sheath.
The officers, identified by the state agency as Nicholas Remick and Jessica Khalil, shot and killed 51-year-old Jose Mendez-Rios during a standoff on Feb. 4, 2025. Richmond police said in a news release that Mendez-Rios charged at officers with a sheath that they mistook for a knife, during a standoff that had lasted 30 minutes.
The Department of Justice released Remick and Khalil’s names as part of its statewide protocol investigating any case where the police kill an unarmed person. Weeks earlier, the office of Richmond City Attorney Dave Aleshire responded to a request from this news organization for the officers names by instead releasing a list of 31 names of officers who responded to the incident that day, including Khalil and Remick.
The city’s police union president, Sgt. Ben Therriault, lambasted the city’s decision to “muddy the waters” by releasing 31 names instead of two and said the publication caused another problem.
“The city is required by agreement and policy to notify officers that their names are being released,” Therriault said. “No officer is surprised to see the city violated its own negotiated rules.”
The city has not yet released video footage of the fatal encounter.
Concord, another Contra Costa city where police shot and killed a man two weeks after Richmond’s police shooting, has already released the names of the officers and video of that incident. It shows police firing repeatedly at a man who was in the process of stabbing his father repeatedly when the cops arrived.
Mendez-Rios was killed a little before 9 p.m. on Feb. 4, along the railroad tracks near the 300 block of Carlson Boulevard in south Richmond. A Richmond police news release says officers showed up around 8:15 p.m. and were attempting to arrest Mendez-Rios on suspicion of violating his probation by committing an act of domestic violence.
Mendez-Rios allegedly refused to surrender. The news release says officers spent the half-hour attempting to de-escalate the situation when he charged at them with an empty sheath that, in the dark, appeared to be a large knife. Remick and Khalil then fired at him.
Remick is the defendant in two active police brutality lawsuits. One alleges he was present when two other officers injured a man during an arrest. The other says Remick and a second officer, Sgt. Alexander Caine, sent a man named Kwesi Guss to the emergency room with multiple injuries for filming police as they arrested another man for a high-speed chase. The city has filed a response to the suit saying the defendants “expressly deny any wrongdoing,” without going into detail.
In addition to the DOJ investigation, the Contra Costa Sheriff will hold an inquest hearing to review Mendez-Rios’ death at a to-be-determined date. These are routinely held for all police-involved fatalities, from shootings to incidents where people die of natural causes at the jail, and jurors are asked to decide the official manner of death.
It is the first police shooting involving a Richmond officer since 2023, when police shot and killed a 66-year-old man during a raid. The decedent, Kevin McDonald, reportedly brandished an unregistered rifle at the officers, who later pulled machine guns, explosives and numerous other firearms from the home. The officers, Caine and Detective Robert Branch, were cleared of wrongdoing.