PITTSBURG — A new federal lawsuit accuses a former Pittsburg cop of shooting a 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.
Mejia-Orozco would later claim that Porter came at him with a knife. The lawsuit alleges that video from his body-worn camera “does not support this version of events” and includes screenshots showing Porter with his hands raised, reportedly “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.
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.
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