Prosecutor rules Yakima fatal police shooting justified

A state commission says a fatal shooting by Yakima police warrants a federal investigation, while the Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office calls the shooting justifiable.

The head of the state Commission on Hispanic Affairs sees J. Juan Briseno-Ortega’s June 10 death as part of a pattern of Hispanics killed during encounters with police, and believes an independent investigation is necessary to build trust in the community.

“It really calls out that there are systemic issues going on,” commission Chairwoman Gloria Ochoa-Bruck said Thursday after the prosecutor’s office issued a determination the shooting was justified.

Earlier this week, commission members asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office to review the July 31 fatal shooting of Mario Martinez Torres by Wapato police.

Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney Joe Brusic said there is no evidence to suggest that Briseno-Ortega’s shooting had any sign of ethnic bias.

Yakima police detectives, who investigated Briseno-Ortega’s shooting and are also investigating Martinez Torres’s shooting, are qualified to handle the cases in a fair and impartial manner, Brusic said.

“If I thought for a moment that there was any impropriety, I would reach out to another agency to investigate,” Brusic said.

However, there are plans in the works to create an interagency group comprised of several police departments that could handle such investigations in the future, he said.

Brusic released a report Thursday clearing Yakima police Officer Brad Althauser of any criminal wrongdoing in Briseno-Ortega’s death.

Althauser and Sgt. Ryan Wisner went to the 2125 S. 68th Ave. home that Briseno-Ortega, 50, shared with his brother after a 911 call from a neighbor reporting the brothers were fighting.

Police said Briseno-Ortega was shot twice in the chest after ignoring Althauser’s orders to raise his hands and instead reached for his waistband, where officers found a loaded .22-caliber revolver.

Brusic said audio from a dashboard camera corroborated the officers’ accounts of what happened.

“I conclude that the officer, under these facts, had probable cause to believe that the suspect posed a threat of serious physical harm to himself, Sgt. Wisner and/or the assault victim still remaining in the garage,” Brusic wrote in his report.

Brusic’s finding did not surprise Ochoa-Bruck, but she said it was disappointing. Recent events suggest that officers may not be trying to de-escalate situations involving Hispanics with possible mental health or drug issues, she added.

She noted that since 2014, seven people, four of them Hispanic, have been fatally shot by police in the Yakima Valley.

The most recent was July 31, when Mario Martinez Torres, 38, of Wapato was shot after Wapato officers responded to a report of domestic violence. Wapato police said Martinez Torres was shot after he took a Taser from one of the responding officers and used it on another officer during a fight.

Brusic said he found no evidence of bias in the Briseno-Ortega case, or any of the other police shootings he has reviewed since taking office in January 2015.

Ochoa-Bruck said the request for a federal investigation was not an anti-police move, but was a call for transparency and accountability.

“There has to be a process where an outside agency comes in,” Ochoa-Bruck said. “There is a perception that the investigation is not fair and impartial.”

Yakima police, as a matter of policy, investigate their own officer-involved shooting cases, and turn the results over to the county’s prosecutor to determine if the shooting is justified.

Brusic and Yakima police say the department has the experience and expertise to conduct a fair and impartial investigation of one of its own officers.

While it would be preferable to have an outside agency do the investigation, it would be hard for another agency to come in from another part of the state to handle an investigation, said police Capt. Jeff Schneider.

Brusic said his review provides an additional layer of impartiality to the investigation.

“I don’t have a dog in the fight,” Brusic said.

Ochoa-Bruck doesn’t buy that argument. She said there are regional resources that the Yakima Police Department could call on to investigate one of its own, such as the Washington State Patrol.

Brusic said he is working with Yakima County Sheriff’s Office and the Union Gap Police Department to assemble a multi-agency team that could investigate such incidents in the future.

A similar team is used in the Tri-Cities, where officers from the Prosser, Connell, Pasco, Richland and Kennewick police departments, plus the sheriff’s offices of Benton, Franklin and Grant counties, investigates officer-involved shootings.

This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 7:41 PM with the headline "Prosecutor rules Yakima fatal police shooting justified."