Dog walker describes scary encounter with Nieto before shooting
A man who encountered Alejandro “Alex” Nieto in a San Francisco park testified Tuesday that the 27-year-old City College student had threatened him with a Taser moments before being shot and killed by police who mistook the stun gun for a pistol.
Attorneys for the four San Francisco police officers named in the Nieto family’s federal wrongful-death suit against the city called Evan Snow, who was walking his Siberian husky in Bernal Heights Park the day Nieto was killed, to buttress their assertion that Nieto had been acting erratically and threatening people before the confrontation with police.
The officers say they fired in self-defense because Nieto threatened them with a gun-shaped Taser, which they took to be a pistol.
Lateef Gray, a lawyer representing the Nieto family, sought to raise doubts about Snow’s credibility on cross-examination, noting that he testified in a deposition that he had been distracted by an attractive female jogger and had made inflammatory and racist statements after his encounter with Nieto.
On cross-examination, Gray pointed to testimony Snow gave in a deposition, in which he said he had assumed Nieto was a gang member because of the way he dressed.
Gray also pointed to deposition testimony in which Snow said he had been distracted at one point by a female jogger with an attractive posterior.
Gray also brought up text messages Snow sent to a friend in the minutes after the encounter, in which Snow said he wished the run-in had happened in Florida so he could have shot Nieto.
Defense attorneys later called Don Cameron, a former Berkeley and BART police officer and owner of a law enforcement training firm.
The defense called Cameron to rebut the testimony given on Monday by Roger Clark, a retired lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who told the jury that officers’ flawed tactics in approaching Nieto had led to his death.
Cameron said that as long as the officers took the threat posed by Nieto to be either imminent or immediate, “they would be justified in using lethal force.”