A vigil was held over the weekend for Guillermo Medina, the man who was shot and killed by Culver City Police following a domestic incident and chase (both vehicular and on foot).
Back in February, following the news that the family of Medina had filed a lawsuit against the CCPD, the police released a statement that read: “On the morning of December 18th, 2022, members of the Culver City Police Department were involved in an Officer Involved Shooting of Guillermo Medina. The incident is currently under investigation by the California Department of Justice and the California Office of the Attorney General. In the interest of transparency, the Culver City Police Department is releasing the following Critical Incident briefing to provide the community with details surrounding the incident. As part of this video briefing, you will be shown surveillance footage, as well as video footage from the responding officers’ body-worn and vehicle dashboard cameras. You will also hear the 9-1-1 call and radio traffic from our dispatch center, as well as other relevant facts and evidence.”
The police released video footage of the incident, where we see Medina in a 59 minute car chase, and ramming a vehicle at a stop sign into oncoming traffic. We see him exiting his damaged vehicle and running from the police before the eventual shooting that killed him. We hear an officer say that he’s reaching into his waist for something, and somebody remarks that it might be a cellphone. Medina was unarmed, though there was a replica gun in his vehicle.
However, as far as his family is concerned, Medina was an unarmed man suffering with mental illness, and the action taken by the officer wasn’t proportionate with the danger posed.
“This wasn’t a bad person, a criminal,” Nancy Barba, a family friend, told ABC News. “This was someone having a mental health crisis and the tragic thing was this was the only resource to a family member.”
“I just don’t want the world to continue to talk bad about him and say bad things about him,” Medina’s widow, Adriana Medina, told ABC News. “And for God’s sake my children are reading this stuff. What’s wrong with people? They watched their father die. Was that not enough?”