A San Jose police sniper was justified in killing a machete-wielding man who broke into a house last year and threatened to cut the heads off a mother and her two children, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday.
Officer Edward Carboni “made a reasonable tactical decision” when he fired seven shots through a bedroom window at Eliobert Gonzalez, 35, during the man’s “erratic and violent” tear through the family’s home in March 2023. Gonzalez, 35, was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
The shooting marks the fourth time in as many years that Carboni has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing after fatally shooting someone while on duty. Two of the previous shootings happened in 2019, while the third came in 2022.
On Tuesday, Santa Clara County prosecutor Rob Baker lauded the officer for saving the lives of a mother and her two children last year.
“The fact that Gonzalez was armed with what appeared to be a .357 revolver made the circumstances even more dire, demanding quick action,” Baker’s report said.
Carboni was among a swell of officers called to the family’s house the evening of March 22, 2023, amid reports that a mother and her two boys — ages 18 and 7 — were being held hostage by a neighbor who had recently been evicted from a nearby apartment.
Investigators say Gonzalez first broke into the house through a back sliding glass window and immediately confronted the two boys in the living room as they played video games and watched TV. He then before chased them to a back bedroom, where their mother was using a computer.
Gonzalez falsely believed the family were his apartment managers, authorities said. Once he cornered the family in the back bedroom, he threatened to kill them if they didn’t give him the keys to his apartment — warning them that if police tried to take him away, he would “take them away first,” according to the prosecutors’ report.
At one point, the mother managed to shut Gonzalez out of the bedroom, only have him break down the door, the report said. Police were only called after the woman faked a call to the man’s actual apartment managers and instead called her husband, who phoned authorities for help.
About 10 minutes after Gonzalez broke into the house, police began using a loudspeaker to order him outside with his hands up. When that didn’t work, officers called in a “specialized weapons and tactical team,” one well-versed in hostage situations. The team included Carboni, who told his supervisors that if the opportunity to save the family presented itself, he would “take a shot,” the report said.
Fifty minutes into the ordeal, Carboni made his way to a back bedroom window, where he spotted Gonzalez holding what appeared to be revolver in one hand and machete in the other — one raised over the mother’s head. The woman’s teenaged son was on the ground nearby, tied up.
At that point, Carboni radioed to his team the words: “Shot away in 30 seconds.” Twenty seconds later, he added that “I’m going to shoot this guy,” according to the report.
At five seconds, Carboni said that Gonzalez told the mother to “shut up,” adding “there is nothing else I can do.” That’s when the officer gave a three-second countdown over the radio and fired seven shots at the man.
Carboni told investigators that he gave the 30-second countdown to ensure that fellow officers in the front of the apartment would immediately rush inside once he opened fire and arrest Gonzalez, according to Baker’s report. Another officer was tasked with breaking the bedroom window a split-second before Carboni opened fire, prosecutors added.
Baker said there was “reasonable grounds” for Carboni not to warn Gonzalez that he planned to open fire, because other officers had given at least 10 commands to him to surrender from the loudspeaker. The warnings came in both English and Spanish, the report said.
Police said after the incident that the firearm Gonzalez was holding was later found to be a pellet gun that had been made to look like a .357 Magnum revolver.
Baker’s report said Gonzalez was likely suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness at the time — one that recently led him to become paranoid and to believe people were following him, a family member told investigators. He was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol when shot, the report said.
The incident marked the fourth time that Carboni killed someone while on duty.
In May 2019, he and two other officers fatally shot 24-year-old Efren Esquivel, who had been sought for a car theft; when the officers confronted Esquivel, he rammed a police car and struck and briefly dragged a police sergeant while trying to escape.
Five months later, on Oct. 31, Carboni fatally shot 33-year-old Francis Calonge as he carried what turned out to be a replica handgun while walking toward Independence High School on Jackson Avenue. In that instance, Carboni was trailing from about 120 feet away when he opened fire after giving several orders to Calonge to drop his weapon.
More recently, in June 2022, Carboni was among two San Jose police officers to fatally shoot a man who held his grandmother and children captive during a shooting spree that left two people dead and stretched from the Bay Area to Modesto.
In each instance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office ruled Carboni’s use of force as justified.
