Sheriff’s deputy testifies about what led to shooting death of Discovery Bay man
MARTINEZ — A Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office detective testified publicly for the first time Wednesday about the events leading up to his shooting of a Discovery Bay man last December.
Detective Matthew Gauthier spoke in a coroner’s inquest hearing, which is part of the protocol in Contra Costa County when a death involves law enforcement and in which a jury must decide the manner in which the person died.
Gauthier said he had finished responding to an earlier call in Pacheco on Dec. 5, 2018 when he drove by a house on Adelaide Drive in Pacheco and spotted Paul Ridgeway, of Discovery Bay, in front of the house. Gauthier said he recognized Ridgeway and knew that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest from Yolo County.
Gauthier said he parked his sheriff’s office-issued vehicle around the corner on Pacheco Boulevard, trying to be “discreet” in approaching Ridgeway on foot. He did not call on the radio for backup from his partner, who had been nearby after they responded to the previous call together, or others. There was not time to call for backup, Gauthier said, before he nearly bumped into Ridgeway as he began to walk around the corner.
Ridgeway started to run from him, Gauthier said. Gauthier caught up to him and jumped on his back, trying to get him into a “bear hug” because he couldn’t see his hands.
“My thought was, if he has a weapon … I have to control his arms,” Gauthier said Wednesday. The pair fell to the ground, Gauthier landing on Ridgeway’s side.
“I started giving commands for him to show his hands,” Gauthier said. “He wasn’t responding. He was thrashing.”
Gauthier, holding a gun to Ridgeway’s head, told him to show his hands, he said. Ridgeway pulled a gun from his pants and held it close to Gauthier’s left eye, he said, firing a shot that sent a bullet past Gauthier’s head.
“I started to fire rounds,” Gauthier said, but did not know how many rounds he ultimately shot.
A pathologist who testified at the hearing, Arnold Josselson, said there were eight gunshot wounds found on Ridgeway’s body, and two of them were fatal and caused his death, including a shot to his chest that entered his lung and a shot to his neck that put a bullet in his spinal cord. A sergeant for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office who was part of the team that investigated the shooting, Charlene Jacquez, said during the hearing that nine shell casings from Gauthier’s gun were found at the scene.
According to the pathologist, Ridgeway had a “very high” level of methamphetamine in his body that showed up on a toxicology report. The same amount could have caused death in other people, Josselson said, but was not the cause of death for Ridgeway. Instead, the two bullet wounds in his neck and chest were.
Jacquez also described investigating Ridgeway. She testified that Ridgeway — who had been to prison before — told friends that he did not want to go back to prison, according to police interviews.
She said Ridgeway had also attempted to take his own life in the past, according to friends’ interviews with police. Jacquez read two notes that she said appeared to be suicide notes from Ridgeway that were found in his car after a search warrant was executed.
Ridgeway authored children’s books and claimed to be a reformed ex-criminal in his author biographies, noting that writing for kids helped him turn a corner in life.
One book he had written but not yet published was titled, The Hole I Never Should Have Dug, and was about “life’s lessons learned the hard way,” according to an excerpt Jacquez read during the hearing.
In a coroner’s inquest hearing, a jury is asked to determine whether a person whose death involved law enforcement officers was the result of an “accident,”a “suicide,” “natural causes,” or “by the hands of another other than by accident.”
In Ridgeway’s case, the jury’s finding was that Ridgeway died at the hands of another person other than by accident.
Gauthier’s testimony on Wednesday differed from what Ridgeway’s girlfriend, Angelica Jorgensen, told reporters immediately after the shooting in December.
Jorgensen told ABC7 that she was with Ridgeway on the street and that he was heading back to their parked silver sedan when a deputy stopped and started running after him.
“As soon as (the deputy) threw (Ridgeway) down on the ground, (the deputy) just shot him,” Jorgensen told an ABC7 reporter last year. “He didn’t give him a chance to do anything.”
Jacquez confirmed that the woman at the scene that day was indeed Ridgeway’s girlfriend, but neither she nor Gauthier spoke about her account of the incident, and she did not testify at the hearing. The pathologist, Gauthier, Jacquez, and a senior inspector for the District Attorney’s office who was also part of the investigation were the only witnesses called to the hearing.
The shooting was not captured on video. The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s office doesn’t require deputies to wear officer body cameras, unlike most Bay Area police departments.
Staff writer Nate Gartrell contributed reporting.