The Oakland City Council voted 6-0-1 in closed session to settle for $450K the case of the late Hernan Jaramillo, a mentally disturbed man who was dragged by OPD from his apartment “20-feet on his back to the sidewalk.”
This settlement adds to the ever-growing total of police execution and brutality payments paid out by the taxpayers of Oakland, with more sure to come as four men have been killed by Oakland police in 2015, and a fifth died under suspicious circumstances while being chased by OPD.
Hernan Jaramillo is perhaps the most unknown – and perhaps the most haunting – victim of OPD.
Almost no news articles were written about his death or about the subsequent investigation (which of course cleared the officers of any wrongdoing – does this article really have to even note that?). His name was not released immediately, and so never appeared in the few articles that did cover the death. No pictures of him are readily available.
An essay in Counterpoint by a local activist, who obtained his name from a public records request weeks after Hernan’s death, noted
In other words, Oakland police beat Hernan to death in front of his own house. They never alleged that he’d done anything criminal.
Only once a lawsuit was filed and then the settlement was announced was anything written with his name. An article in Courthouse News describes what happened in more detail:
Hernan Jaramillo, 51, died from asphyxiation under the weight of five police officers attempting to subdue him in front of his house on the 2300 block of 21st Street in Oakland on July 8, 2013…
Biocini says her brother “pleaded with the officers that if they did not let him breathe, he would die.” When the officers flipped Jaramillo’s body over, he was covered in blood, “limp and seemingly lifeless,” and his head dropped back loudly on the pavement
John Burris, the family’s attorney, is quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying
This man was at his house and the police come, and he winds up dead.
Jaramillo is one of thousands of cases (Kayla Moore, of Berkeley, is another) of police encountering a mentally ill person only to have him or her end up dead. In this case the original call was because his sister thought an intruder had entered her apartment; in many cases, even in some sense more horrible to contemplate, the call to police is from a family member wishing to get the disturbed individual to help, not to see them dead from asphyxiation or a bullet.
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