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A California Northern District Court judge has rejected a subpoena for raw footage from KTVU of a 2022 fatal police shooting in Pleasanton that was being jointly sought by both sides in a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the daughter of the man who was killed.
According to the minutes from a June 13 discovery hearing in the case made public on Monday, the court had denied a June 6 order from the attorney for the city and the four police officers named in the lawsuit asking the court to compel KTVU to produce raw footage of the incident, following an objection from the local news station.
The lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of the daughter of Cody Chavez, the man fatally shot by Pleasanton police officers outside of an apartment on Willow Road on Feb. 17, 2022, alleges excessive use of force that was “unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement purpose.” It was filed on Sept. 20, 2022 and is set to go to trial next year.
Chavez, 33, was shot following an hours-long standoff with PPD, who initially responded to a domestic call at the apartment then enhanced their response over the course of approximately three and a half hours that Chavez remained barricaded in the apartment. He finally exited the apartment holding a knife before being fatally shot by officers Brian Jewell and Mario Guillermo, who are named in the lawsuit along with Kenneth White and Anthony Repetto, who were reportedly at the scene and fired less-lethal weapons at Chavez.
The civil case contradicts several claims in initial information in the shooting provided by PPD and in a report from then-district attorney Nancy O’Malley’s office released at the end of her term in 2022 and made public shortly after current District Attorney Pamela Price took office in January 2023.
O’Malley’s report cleared Jewell and Guillermo of any criminal wrongdoing, with the investigation then being reopened by Price later that month. Price’s office did not return a request for comment on the status of that investigation as of Wednesday.
As the wrongful-death case on behalf of Chavez’s daughter, represented by prominent civil rights attorney John Burris, makes its way through the ongoing discovery process ahead of next year’s trial, attorneys for the city and police began jointly pursuing a subpoena, along with Burris, for raw video footage from KTVU.
In the June 6 order requesting that the court compel KTVU to produce the footage Noah Blechman, attorney for the city and PPD officers, calls the footage “key” to the case and said both parties believed it could assist in helping the court to understand the circumstances leading up to Chavez’s death. The order includes a screenshot from KTVU footage of the incident that was aired, meant to highlight the news crew’s vantage point compared with that of drone and body-worn camera footage from PPD.
“All in all, while these police videos above provide some information and insights into this shooting incident, the likely best evidence and most complete video, from the best vantage point, with potential critical associated audio information and associated data as well, is likely the KTVU (Fox) video being sought jointly by the parties in this matter,” Blechman wrote.
Attorneys for KTVU from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine filed an objection to the order several days later on June 11, arguing that raw footage from PPD had not been provided to KTVU or made public, with the screenshots from PPD footage included in Blechman’s June 6 order failing to suffice as evidence for issues with the raw footage recorded by PPD.
“The entire declaration is premised on the assumption that KTVU’s unpublished footage is somehow ‘critical’ because its context is unique from all of the other evidence available to Defendants,” attorneys for KTVU wrote in their June 11 objection. “But counsel does not – and cannot – state that his cherry-picking of a few screenshots from selective videos reflects all of the relevant evidence already in Defendants’ possession, or to which they have had access.”
