Mario Arenales Gonzalez

Mario Gonzalez, 26, was asphyxiated by three Alameda police officers on April 19, 2021, a day before cop Derek Chauvin was found guilty of suffocating George Floyd in the same manner. However, in the case of Gonzalez, the charges against the cops have been dismissed! The cops responded to two 911 calls reporting Gonzalez was hanging out in a small Alameda park and that there were bottles of liquor nearby. One caller explained that “He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s just scaring my wife.”

Gonzalez was unarmed and threatening no one. But when he could not produce an ID and resisted being handcuffed, the cops threw him to the ground and knelt on his back with his face buried in the mulch. Some five minutes later he was dead. All this can be seen in the body-cam video (link below). Shortly after his death, his brother Gerardo Gonzalez described how Gonzalez liked to get away from their neighborhood in east Oakland—where gang shootings, robberies, murders and police actions are relatively common—and go to the nearby small island city of Alameda.

An altar in honor of Gonzalez was put up by his family in the park where he was killed. The memorial was later burned down, the perpetrators unidentified. It has since been rebuilt.

Gonzalez had been the caregiver for his brother Efrain, and his mother Edith Arenales has repeatedly spoken out against his murder by the cops. Both Edith and Mario´s brother-in-law Erik Cortes have endorsed OPA.

In January 2023 “reform” D.A. Pamela Price vowed to revisit the Gonzalez murder and seven other cases with a newly created Public Accountability Unit. In April 2024 involuntary manslaughter charges were finally brought against the three cops, only to be dropped over the next eight months based on various errors by Price’s office including late paperwork, statute of limitations and autopsy report technicalities.

The police archives must be opened! We call for release of all related statements, texts and email made by and among the three cops before, at the time of and after Gonzalez’ killing. All incident and autopsy reports and any additional audio and video recordings must be made public. The history of the three cops, including personnel records from Alameda and any other police agencies they have worked, must be released. Jail the killer cops!