A 10-month investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office into BART officer Joseph Mateu’s deadly shooting of Sahleem Tindle came to an end with no criminal charges being filed against the officer.
“I’m saddened,” Tindle’s mother Yolanda Banks Reed said. “I am very saddened, as I told Nancy O’ Malley. It don’t surprise me. It didn’t surprise me.”
Back on Jan. 3, 2018, Officer Mateu was responding to the scene of two men fighting over a gun across the street from the West Oakland BART Station. One of those men was Tindle. The DA’s 38-page final report concludes the evidence does not justify criminal charges.
The report states the officer’s body camera footage indicates that Mr. Tindle was holding a pistol in his right hand at the time the officer fired.
“This is Sahleem here,” Civil Rights Attorney John Burris said. “This is the officer with his arms extended.”
Civil Rights attorney John Burris disputes the D.A.’s conclusion that Tindle was in fact holding a gun at the time that he was shot.
“In the video from the officer’s point of view, what you see, you can look out and you see two men tussling,” Burris said. “You don’t know who has what. There is nothing about those videos that I can see that clearly reflects who had what. My point is that you don’t know, you don’t just get to shoot. You need to have more definitive evidence. For my point of view, there should be at least the prosecution for manslaughter.”
However, the civil right’s attorney says in the 40 years of his legal practice, he has only seen DA’s in Alameda County bring one criminal charge in a deadly officer shooting.
“The only one I can remember on its face is the Oscar Grant case,” Burris said.
Tindle’s mother and her attorney will now shift their focus on a civil wrongful death case lawsuit that was filed last month against the BART Police Department.