PLEASANTON – Two police officers who fatally shot a San Jose man armed with a knife in a domestic dispute last year in Pleasanton will not face criminal charges, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office said.
In a report released Friday, prosecutors said all available evidence indicated Officers Brian Jewell and Mario Guillermo were justified in believing 33-year-old Cody Chavez posed a significant threat of death or serious bodily injury to others when they shot and killed him Feb. 17 outside an apartment in the 4800 block of Willow Road. Officers had tried to stop Chavez with less-lethal means before shooting him after he lunged at them.
“The overwhelming, credible and admissible evidence shows that Officer Jewell and Officer Guillermo acted lawfully and in defense of others,” prosecutors wrote.
According to the report, officers were first called to the scene by a woman who said that Chavez, a boyfriend from whom she had previously sought court protection with a restraining order, had come to her apartment. She told dispatchers he had assaulted her, covered her face with a pillow, taken her mobile phone and prevented her from leaving her apartment over the course of the previous night.
The woman told dispatchers she had allowed Chavez to talk his way back into her apartment even though she had sought a restraining court order to keep him from being around her or the apartment. The report said the order she’d sought wasn’t served, had expired and no others were in effect at the time.
Chavez eventually allowed the woman to leave her apartment so she could go to work.
The woman gave officers permission to enter her apartment, but every time they punched in the code to unlock the front door, Chavez relocked it, prosecutors said.
Following repeated attempts to reach Chavez by phone and a public address system, a SWAT team and an armored response vehicle, or ARV, were summoned to the scene. They were joined by a team of crisis negotiators, who asked Chavez to “come outside peacefully” and “tell his side of the story,” according to the report.
Chavez told one negotiator he was at work in San Jose, but officers had already spotted him inside the apartment through a window. Prosecutors said Chavez also sent text messages to the woman telling her to make the officers leave because they were “gonna kick this door in and kill me.”
Officers went on to obtain a warrant for Chavez’s arrest based on the woman’s allegations. They then forced open the door and tried to send in a robot equipped with a camera and a two-way communication system. However, Chavez blocked the door, picked up the robot and threw it out of the apartment, according to the report.
At that time, Chavez was spotted holding a “large kitchen knife” with an 8-inch blade, prosecutors said.
Officers then broke a window to send in a drone to gather information about what was happening inside the apartment. As a team of four officers worked to pull out the blinds to clear a line of sight, Chavez left the apartment with the knife in his right hand, according to the report.
Prosecutors said officers repeatedly ordered Chavez to drop the knife but he did not comply. As Chavez turned toward the team, which was about eight feet away to his right, one officer fired two bean bag rounds at Chavez’s left thigh, but the rounds did not appear to have any effect. Chavez then lunged at the team, leading another officer to fire five projectiles from a less-lethal riot gun at Chavez’ head and chest. Like the bean bag rounds, the projectiles did not appear to have any effect.
Officers Jewell and Guillermo in turn shot Chavez a total of seven times with their department-issued rifles, according to the report. Chavez fell to the ground and was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy identified three gunshot wounds as his cause of death. The officers were not injured, police said.
Jewell and Guillermo told investigators they opened fire because they feared for the lives of their fellow officers, prosecutors said.
According to the report, to charge the officers with a criminal offense, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not act in lawful self-defense or defense of others in the police department’s attempt to apprehend Chavez.
It wasn’t Chavez’ first run-in with the law. In August 2021 he pleaded guilty to assault with great bodily injury for an unprovoked June 28, 2020 attack on a Jamaican man on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz, and was sentenced to two years probation and a suspended 180 days of jail time.
“When Mr. Chavez ran towards officers from a distance of eight feet with a knife, he was a danger to multiple officers,” prosecutors wrote. “Officer Jewell’s and Officer Guillermo’s use of deadly force was necessary because Mr. Chavez posed an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to the officers at the window.”
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