The lone remaining Alameda police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 death of Mario Gonzalez pleaded not guilty Friday in a case that has drawn comparisons to the murder of George Floyd four years ago in Minneapolis.
Eric McKinley, 38, remained largely silent while his attorney entered the plea Friday. He was ordered back to court on Nov. 7 for a key evidentiary hearing, which will determine whether the case will proceed to trial.
The officer’s plea came just weeks after two other Alameda police officers saw their cases dismissed over concerns that the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office waited too long to charge the men, violating the three-year statute of limitations.
The dismissals continued to roil Gonzalez’s family on Friday. Outside the courthouse, his mother, Edith Arenales, suggested those involved in her son’s death were not fit to remain police officers.
“We are still here, we are still fighting,” Arenales said.
The case has seen numerous twists and turns since Gonzalez’s death on April 19, 2021, when officers piled on top of the man until he stopped breathing while trying to make an arrest. Alameda officers suspected Gonzalez broke a municipal code banning open alcohol containers in public, and they tackled him when he resisted being handcuffed, according to police video.
Gonzalez was pinned to the ground and screamed for several minutes before falling unconscious, the video showed.
The Alameda County Coroner’s Office later ruled that his death was a homicide, citing “stress of altercation and restraint” while also noting the “toxic effects of methamphetamine,” “morbid obesity” and “alcoholism” as contributing factors. Former Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing, suggesting their response was “objectively reasonable.”
However, an independent autopsy requested by Gonzalez’s family determined the primary cause of death was “restraint asphyxiation.” It also found that methamphetamine levels in his body were too low to contribute to his death.
On April 18 — a day before the three-year anniversary of Gonzalez’s death — Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price called a rare after-hours news conference to announce charges against the men. The 11th-hour decision came down to “trying to rebuild trust in a system that has not always been fair to folks, particularly in Alameda County,” Price said at the time.
Yet on Oct. 7, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Scott Patton dismissed charges against the two other officers in the case — James Fisher and Cameron Leahy — after he found that Price’s office failed to secure the necessary paperwork before the three-year statute of limitations ran out.
McKinley was an exception, Patton ruled, because he spent the first five months of the year on a volunteer mission trip in South Africa, causing the statute of limitations in his case to be paused while he was out of state.
On Friday, McKinley’s attorney said in court that he received an email from Price the previous evening, saying she “had a confidential communication with the decedent’s family member regarding representation” before Price took office, when she was a private attorney. The attorney, Jim Shore, said the email came in response to a subpoena filed by McKinley’s attorney, and he said it could form the basis of a motion to recuse the district attorney’s office from the case.
No such motion had been filed as of Friday morning. Shore did not offer any more details in court about when Price spoke with the family, including when the conversation happened or its substance.
Price’s communications team declined Friday to comment on the matter.
