Jury awards $21 million to family of Elena Mondragón, a pregnant teen murdered by police

• Justice takes time, but it always comes.
• After years of waiting, a jury has ruled in the murder of pregnant teenager Elena Mondragón.
• The family of Elena Mondragón, who was murdered by the police, will receive $21 million.

Justice may take time, but it always comes. The family of Elena Mondragón, the pregnant teenager killed in an operation by the Fremont police in California, will receive $21 million after a jury issued their verdict this week. It’s a historic figure for this type of case.

Late Friday, June 23, the jury awarded the historically high amount of $21 million after Fremont police shot and killed a pregnant teenager nearly five years ago. The city has to pay $10.2 million and the driver of the car the victim was in has to pay the other half, KTVU said.

Elena Mondragón’s family will receive historic compensation

Civil rights attorney Adante Pointer, who represented the family of Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon in federal court in San Jose, said he had never heard of such a large award in a jury verdict against a police officer in the United States.

According to an analysis by KTVU, the most cities have had to pay families in wrongful death lawsuits over the past five years has been roughly $5 million per case. «I hope that verdicts like this will force a necessary change,» Pointer told KTVU. «Her death should not have happened.»

How did Elena Mondragon die?

Adante Pointer took the case with his partner Patrick Buelna and other high-profile civil rights lawyers, Melissa Nold and John Burris, according to the outlet. Elena Mondragón, 16 years old and a resident of Antioch, was fatally shot on March 14 2017 by undercover Fremont police officers: Sergeant Jeremy Miskella, Detective Joel Hernandez and Officer Ghailan Chahouati.

The victim had been traveling in a stolen BMW car driven by 19-year-old Rico Tiger. He had been tracked by task force officers to an apartment complex in Hayward. Tiger, who was wanted on suspicion of multiple violent armed robberies, was in the parking lot and, after being cornered, backed up the car and collided with the officers.

Elena Mondragon was shot four times

In response, officers opened fire on the moving BMW, an action that violated police department policy, the KTVU report explained. Elena Mondragón was shot four times and later died in a hospital. Her family learned that she was in her first trimester of pregnancy at the time.

Rico Tiger was not hit by the bullets, but he crashed the BMW and fled the scene. He was later arrested in San Francisco. The Alameda County prosecutor charged him with murder. None of the five officers present at the operation had their body cameras activated at the time of the shooting, a fact that Adante Pointer did not fail to emphasize during the trial, the KTVU report mentioned.

Who has to pay the $21 million dollars to Elena Mondragón’s family?

The Bay Area News Group reported that the jury ultimately decided that Rico Tiger was 51% responsible for the teen’s death, while Miskella was 25% responsible, and Chahouati and Hernandez were both 12% responsible. Attorney Pointer said the family will most likely never see the money portion of the verdict from the driver of the BMW.

City Attorney Patrick Moriarty could not be reached immediately after the five-day trial that ended Wednesday, KTVU reported. The verdict was announced on Friday after normal court hours. But during the trial, the Bay Area News Group reported that Moriarty told the jury that, despite the emotional nature of the case, they should focus only on the evidence when deciding whether the officers used excessive force, something which, he insisted, they did not. However, the final decision favored the victim’s family.