For Joseph Mann, suffering a mental health crisis while Black and homeless on the streets of Sacramento proved to be a death sentence.
The execution was carried out last July by Sacramento police officers Randy Lozoya and John Tennis, who twice attempted to run over Mann in their patrol vehicle — and, when that failed, exited and gunned him down, firing 18 times and riddling Mann with 14 bullets.
Yet Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert has since cleared both officers of any wrongdoing.
That’s despite dash-cam video from the patrol car driven by Mann’s murderers, which captured their conversation leading up to his death. “Fuck this guy,” Lozoya can be heard saying. “I’m gonna hit him.” Tennis responds: “Okay. Go for it.”
After the attempts to run down Mann failed, one of the officer says, “We’ll get him,” before both exit the vehicle and murder him. The tape ends with the sound of Mann’s death agony.
Before police were forced to release video footage, the original police account offered to the Sacramento Bee and to Joseph Mann’s family portrayed the events as the heroic actions of two veteran officers defending their own lives and the safety of bystanders. “Mann turned toward them, still armed with the knife,” according to the initial Bee account. “It was then that two officers, fearing for their lives and worried he might hurt citizens in the area, fired their service weapons hitting Mann ‘multiple times,’ according to police.”
Robert Mann, the brother of the victim, has been raising questions since right after the killing. The Mann family demanded the release of the dash-cam video for months, but their pleas were ignored by Chief Sam Somers Jr. and the Sacramento Police Department. “They lied to me flat out,” Mann told reporters. “They told me my brother was aggressive, he was coming at officers and they had no time to make any other decision but to shoot my brother.”
It’s not surprising that Sacramento police ignored the Mann family’s repeated requests…