Oscar Grant was a 22-year-old Black man who was killed in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009 by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California. Responding to reports of a fight on a crowded Bay Area Rapid Transit train returning from San Francisco, BART Police officers detained Grant and several other passengers on the platform at the Fruitvale BART Station. BART officer Anthony Pirone kneed Grant in the head and forced Grant to lie face down on the platform. Officer Johannes Mehserle drew his pistol and shot Grant. Grant was rushed to Highland Hospital in Oakland and pronounced dead later that day. The events were captured on bystanders' mobile phones. Owners would then upload the footage to YouTube. Both protests and riots took place in the following days.
On January 30, 2010, Alameda County prosecutors charged Mehserle with second-degree murder in their indictment for the shooting. Mehserle resigned from his position and pleaded not guilty. The trial began on June 10, 2010. On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and not guilty of the murder charge.
Though initial protests on July 8, 2010, against the jury verdict were peacefully organized, after dark there were incidents of looting, arson, destruction of property, and small riots. Nearly 80 people were eventually arrested. On November 5, 2010, Mehserle was sentenced to two years, minus time served. He served his time in Los Angeles County Jail protective custody, held in a private cell for his safety. On June 13, 2011, Mehserle was released under parole after serving 11 months. Following a 2012 failed appeal of his conviction, Mehserle changed his name and his profession.
Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris filed a $25,000,000.00 wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Grant's family. BART settled with Grant's daughter and mother for a total of $2,800,000.00 in 2011. It also settled with several of Grant's friends who had sued for damages because of police brutality. A separate suit by Grant's father did not result in a jury award, as it was decided that due to his imprisonment he was not sufficiently involved in Grant's life.
The killing, and the protests against it, were an important precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013. The biographical drama film Fruitvale Station (2013), written and directed by Ryan Coogler, portrays the last 24 hours of Grant's life, his killing, and the immediate aftermath.
Involved parties
Oscar Juliuss Grant III
Oscar Juliuss Grant III (February 27, 1986 – January 1, 2009) lived in Hayward, California. He worked as a meat cutter at Farmer Joe's Marketplace in Oakland's Dimond District after jobs at several Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. Grant had attended both San Lorenzo and Mount Eden high schools in San Lorenzo and Hayward, respectively, until the 10th grade and eventually earned his GED. Grant was on parole at the time of his death, having been released from prison following a 16-month sentence for gun possession.
Grant's funeral was held at the Palma Ceia Baptist Church in Hayward on January 7, 2009. His mother, sister, daughter, and girlfriend (his daughter's mother) filed a wrongful death claim against BART following his death. It was settled in 2011.
Johannes Mehserle
Johannes Sebastian Mehserle (born 1982, in Germany) was raised in the Bay Area. He graduated from New Technology High School in Napa, California.
Mehserle joined the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Police in March 2007.
Incident
Oscar Grant had been celebrating with his friends at The Embarcadero in San Francisco on New Year's Eve. He and about eight friends returned to the East Bay in the lead car of a BART train bound for Fruitvale, a station in Oakland. BART offered extended service and a special "Flash Pass" for the New Year's Eve holiday.
At approximately 2:00 a.m. PDT, BART Police responded to reports of a physical altercation involving up to 20 people on an incoming train from the West Oakland BART Station; the participants were described as "hammered and stoned".
BART Officer Marysol Domenici was the first officer on the scene along with her partner, Tony Pirone. The officers removed Grant and several other men suspected of fighting from the train and detained them on the platform. They tried to take control of passengers coming off the train. Domenici testified at the BART incident hearing that Grant and his friends swore at her and did not obey her orders; she is quoted as having testified that: "If they would've followed orders, this wouldn't have happened. They probably would've just been cited and released."
Pirone handcuffed Grant's friend, angering other riders, and proceeded to line up Grant and two other men against the wall.
Grant raised his hands while seated against the platform wall. A subsequent internal investigation conducted by an outside law firm retained by BART found that Pirone lied when he claimed to have confirmed with the train operator that the men the BART police detained on the platform were involved in the reported train fight; rather, the train operator recalled informing Pirone that she was unsure whether those detained had been involved in the fight.
When five other officers, including Johannes Mehserle and his partner Woffinden, arrived at the Fruitvale station, they found the situation to be "chaotic", according to their own accounts.
While dozens of people from the stopped train shouted and cursed at officers, Mehserle and Pirone positioned Grant face-down. According to Pirone, Grant was disobeying instructions and cursing at officers. Witnesses said that Grant pleaded with BART police not to shock him with a taser. Pirone knelt on Grant's neck and told him that he was under arrest for resisting an officer.
A cell phone video (broadcast on local television station KTVU on January 23) showed what appeared to be Pirone rushing towards one of the detained men and punching him in the face multiple times, two minutes before the shooting occurred. Grant's family alleges in their civil claim against BART that an officer threw Grant against a wall and kneed him in the face. Witnesses testified that Pirone was the aggressor during the incident. An attorney for Grant's family, John Burris, also disputed Pirone's account, saying that Grant and his friends were "peaceful" when the train stopped.
The internal investigation report found that Pirone struck Grant in the head and kneed him, likely causing injuries documented in his autopsy, including head fractures and a hematoma. Until the report became public in May 2019, Pirone's attorney had maintained that Grant provoked Pirone by trying to knee the officer in the groin and by hitting Domenici's arm when she tried to handcuff one of Grant's friends.
Additional footage from a cell phone was presented in court showing Pirone standing over the prone Grant before the shooting and yelling: "Bitch ass nigga, right?" Pirone and his attorney say he was repeating an insulting epithet that Grant had yelled at him.
Mehserle tried to handcuff Grant but could not reach his hands. He stood up, unholstered his gun, a SIG Sauer P226, and fired a shot into Grant's back. Immediately after the shooting, Mehserle appeared surprised and raised his hands to his face. Several witnesses say Mehserle said "Oh my God!" several times after the shooting. The .40 caliber bullet from Mehserle's semi-automatic handgun entered Grant's back, exited through his front side and ricocheted off the concrete platform, puncturing his lung. According to one witness, Grant yelled, "You shot me! I got a four-year-old daughter!" Grant died seven hours later, at 9:13 a.m., at Highland Hospital in Oakland.
Initially, there were rumors that Grant was handcuffed before he was killed, but court filings by the district attorney's office do not state that he was handcuffed. However, they do say that Grant's hands were behind his back and that he was "restrained and unarmed". Mehserle said he feared that Grant was "going for his waistband" and a gun. The day after the shooting, BART spokesman Jim Allison said that Grant was not restrained when he was shot, and multiple witnesses testified that Grant refused to give up his hands for handcuffing prior to the shooting. The family's claim against BART stated that Grant was handcuffed only after he was shot.
Video evidence
Direct evidence of the shooting was documented by video cameras held by passengers on the train idling next to the platform, as police detained Grant and a number of other men suspected of being involved in the disturbance. Several witnesses testified during the preliminary hearing for Mehserle's trial that they began recording because they believed BART officers were acting too aggressively. They gave the videos to television news, which broadcast them; others posted videos on the internet.
Oakland attorney John Burris, who represented the family in their suit against BART over Grant's death, said BART confiscated numerous cell phone images that he believed contain additional evidence of the killing. Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff said video confiscated by BART was useful in bringing the murder charge against Mehserle. Witnesses at the scene said police attempted to confiscate cameras. These claims were never acknowledged by BART police.
Orloff, the district attorney, said that several passenger videos that had not been made public were "very helpful" in the investigation.
On January 2, KTVU aired a video by an anonymous passenger who submitted a cell phone video of the shooting. On January 23, KTVU aired a cell-phone video which appeared to show a second officer punching Grant in the face prior to the shooting. In late February, KRON 4 aired a clip of a video showing a different angle of this altercation.
BART spokesperson Linton Johnson described the surveillance footage from the Fruitvale platform cameras as "benign". He said the platform cameras had recorded some of the incident, but footage did not include the shooting.
Frank Borelli, a retired police officer and writer, said that the scene as shown in the video moments before the shooting would be as important to understanding what happened as the shooting itself. "The four officers have to be operating under a high level of stress given the relatively confined setting and the people on the BART train who are expressing, in a very loud vocal fashion, their displeasure with the officers' actions. Those officers, should things go bad for them, are vastly outnumbered by a group of people who have already voiced their unhappiness with the police."
After viewing the shooting from multiple angles, police use-of-force expert Roy Bedard, who initially said he thought the shooting was an accident, changed his mind. He said: "I hate to say this, [but] it looks like an execution to me" and "It really looks bad for the officer." University of San Francisco law professor Robert Talbot said the videos could support a claim of an accidental shooting: "Nothing about his [Mehserle's] body looks murderous."
Influence of videos
Video evidence of the incident were widely broadcast and streamed online. Seven hundred thousand people viewed the videos in the first few days after the shooting. One local television station video posted to its website was downloaded more than 500,000 times in four days, and one independent media video posted to the internet averaged more than 1,000 views per hour. Seeing direct evidence of the shooting resulted in public outrage and protests and fueled riots.
BART review and investigation process
After the 2009 shooting, Mehserle submitted to drug and alcohol testing per BART's standard operating procedure. The results showed no drugs or alcohol in his system. He retained a criminal defense attorney and refused to speak to the authorities, invoking the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act (California Government Code section 3300–3313) and the Fifth Amendment, claiming potential self-incrimination.
BART organized an internal investigation of the incident. On January 5, 2009, Mehserle's attorney postponed a scheduled meeting by BART investigators, seeking to defer it. BART Police administration and investigators commanded the officer to attend an investigative interview on January 7. Mehserle did not attend; instead his attorney and his BART Police Officers Association union representative came and submitted his letter of resignation.
Mehserle and his family received a number of death threats after videos of the shooting appeared, and he moved at least twice. His parents temporarily left their Napa home because of death threats to the family.
Domenici testified at the investigation hearing. She was terminated by BART based on an accusation that she was untruthful in her statements to transit investigators. She appealed the firing. On December 18, 2010, it was reported that San Francisco labor arbitrator William Riker ordered the former officer re-instated with full back pay because there was no basis to find that Domenici was not telling the truth.
Aftermath
The shooting and the subsequent uprisings were covered in regional, national, and international news. Video images of the shooting were widely broadcast and streamed online in the days following Grant's death. Several hundred thousand viewed the videos in the first few days after the incident. Widespread dissemination of the direct evidence of the shooting led to public outrage, protests, and fueled riots.
Police in riot gear were dispatched and made efforts to disperse the crowds. During the course of the evening of January 8, there was peaceful protest, with some of the protesters turning to rioting and rampant property vandalism. A black bloc and other rioters smashed hundreds of car and shop windows, several private cars, and numerous trash containers and dumpsters. Public buildings such as the Oakland Police Internal Affairs office and the almost restored Fox Theatre were heavily vandalized. The rioting wound down later in the evening. Police made at least 105 arrests for suspicion of various offenses. More than 300 businesses were affected by the vandalism.