A Mental Health Distress Call Turned into a Military Operation: Suit Claims Pittsburgh Cops Shot a Black Man in the Back while His Hands Were Raised to Force Him to Get Public Services

From [HERE] A new federal lawsuit accuses a former Pittsburg cop of shooting a Black man whose hands were raised during a call over a “mental health crisis,” and although the same officer has already been part of a suit that settled for $7.3 million, this case may be the least of his legal concerns.

The lead defendant, Ernesto Mejia-Orozco, is set to plead guilty or no contest in two unrelated criminal cases two weeks from now. On June 10, he is scheduled for a change of plea hearing in a case involving allegations he was part of a scheme to quash traffic tickets for bribes. The following day, he’s scheduled to plead guilty in a felonious scheme to defraud the city of Pittsburg by fraudulently obtaining a college degree for educational incentive pay, court records show.

Now, Mejia-Orozco is also a defendant in a federal suit accusing him of shooting a man named Ashton Porter on Feb. 24, 2022. The lawsuit says that while Porter was barricaded inside a hotel room, officers used pepper spray on him and shot him with rubber bullets, before Mejia-Orozco fired a pistol at Porter, striking him twice. He survived.

Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Porter said he feels lucky to be alive and was shocked by the police “lies and cover up.”

“I was looking for one or two good cops who would make sure nothing terrible happened to me,” he said. “Unfortunately for me there wasn’t any cops out there that stood up for me or tried to de-escalate the event.”

Mejia-Orozco would later claim that Porter came at him with a knife. Video shows Porter exiting the hotel room and standing a several feet away from officers. He appears to be standing still as the initial shots are fired and when his body comes into view of an officer’s body camera, his hands are raised. The suit says the video provided by Pittsburg police  “does not support this version of events” and the suit itself includes stills showing Porter with his hands up, “milliseconds” before Mejia-Orozco shot him.

“Nearly two years after the incident, Mr. Porter still suffers every day from the physical and psychological injuries that the Defendant Officers inflicted upon him,” the lawsuit says. Porter’s lawyer, Adante Pointer, said Porter and his family have “bore brunt of police aggression, of police escalation, of police lack of discipline” and that Porter was initially jailed but charges were later dropped.

The suit also alleges that Pittsburg police Lt. William Hatcher, who helped supervise the incident, has a “troubling” history of covering up excessive force, referencing years-old claims by a whistleblower that he instructed officers to remove references to them hitting suspects with flashlights from their incident reports.

Mejia-Orozco was one of 14 current and former Antioch and Pittsburg officers charged in a wide range of crimes last year. Many of them have since pleaded guilty, including the alleged ringleader of the college-degree fraud scam, Patrick Berhan, who is set to be sentenced later this summer.

A former Antioch community service officer, Samantha Peterson, recently received probation for her role in the scam, and a third former Pittsburg and Oakland Housing Authority officer — Brauli Rodriguez Jalapa– is set to plead guilty June 25, court records show. Rodriguez Jalapa was also charged earlier this year with drunk driving and threatening cops in Clayton.

In 2020, a wrongful death suit involving Mejia-Orozco and other officers settled for $7.3 million. The suit alleged that the officers killed a man named Humberto Martinez, by placing him in a carotid hold and pinning him to the ground. Martinez died from having the blood stream to his brain cut off, according to the coroner’s report.