Lawsuit claims SLO police Det. Benedetti died by ‘friendly fire’ in shootout
The family of the man who died in the shootout that killed San Luis Obispo Detective Luca Benedetti is suing the city, county and police officers for wrongful death and civil rights violations — and claims that the officer died by “friendly fire.”
Eddie Giron is alleged to have killed Benedetti on May 10, 2021, when the detective and other officers went to his home to execute a search warrant relating to what officials said was a string of commercial robberies. Officials said at the time Giron was “lying in wait” and opened fire upon officers entering his home.
Police said Giron killed Benedetti, injured Det. Steve Orozco, and was hit by officers’ gunfire before he ultimately killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot — a story the Giron family does not believe.
The lawsuit claims city and county officials put forth a false narrative, framing Giron as a “deranged cop killer,” David Kaufman, lawyer for the Giron family, wrote in an email to The Tribune.
The lawsuit alleges the fatal shots that hit Benedetti and Giron, as well as the shot that injured Orozco, were actually fired by police.
The city denies all claims made in the lawsuit and told The Tribune in an email that it is “confident that the remaining details of the interaction will be fully addressed and shared with the public when the District Attorney’s investigation is complete.”
The lawsuit is filed in federal court, alleging Giron’s civil rights and constitutional rights, specifically those protected under the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments, were violated.
It specifically names Orozco, San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson, San Luis Obispo Police Chief Rick Scott, San Luis Obispo Police Capt. Brian Amoroso, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, and the City and County of San Luis Obispo. It also names unnamed officers also involved in the incident.
One detective killed, other injured by ‘friendly fire,’ lawsuit alleges
Police said Giron, armed with a rifle, shot at officers, killing Benedetti and injuring Orozco, before turning the gun on himself.
An independent autopsy by Giron’s family obtained by The Tribune found that Giron was shot 14 times, including an apparently self-inflicted head wound, but did not specify the weapon.
Officials have never publicly confirmed what type of gun Giron had, but San Luis Obispo Sheriff Ian Parkinson told The Tribune during a May 2021 press conference that an assault-style rifle “aligns” with their investigation.
The San Luis Obispo County death certificate also obtained by The Tribune lists Giron’s cause of death as a “single perforating rifle wound to the head.”
“The number of gunshot wounds and the pattern and placement, especially the headshot to the left side of the head on a right-handed person do not seem consistent with suicide,” Kaufman said.
The lawsuit alleges that city and county officials omitted the fact that Giron was shot 14 times and “apparently killed with projectiles from a police officer’s issue weapon, a high-caliber rifle.”
Benedetti and Orozco were shot with “the same caliber weapon that struck” Giron, the lawsuit said, “suggesting that the officers were hit with ‘friendly fire’ and not by bullets fired from a pheasant hunting rifle.”
The lawsuit also does not state that the fatal headshot wound Giron sustained was self-inflicted, but rather “at apparently close range to the top of his head.”
“The allegations in the lawsuit are untrue and disconnected from the documented reality of what happened last May. While we may never know why Eddie Giron did what he did that day, we do know he alone was responsible for the death of Detective Luca Benedetti, the injuries to Detective Steve Orozco and his family, and his death by his own hand,” San Luis Obispo City Attorney Christine Dietrick said in the May email.
‘Officer-created jeopardy’ led to detective and civilian death, lawsuit says
The lawsuit alleges the law enforcement officers who carried out the search warrant at Giron’s residence did not create a plan or use deescalation tactics, leading to “officer-created jeopardy” that cost Benedetti and Giron their lives.
“Officer-created jeopardy is essentially an unjustified risk-taking than can result in an officer using force to protect themselves from a threat that they were, in part, responsible for creating in the first place,” the lawsuit said.
A nonviolent property crime is not serious enough to justify an officer using lethal force, the lawsuit said.
Law enforcement caused this jeopardy in the following ways, according to the lawsuit:
- Officers did not do their due-diligence to research Giron’s mental health history, despite having a record of responding to his mental health crises, in order to come up with a safe plan to serve the search warrant, like activating a team specially trained to interact with those who have severe mental illness.
- Officers engaged in “dynamic entry” of Giron’s residence, broke down the door and immediately “opened up with a fusillade of gunfire.”
- Officers failed to engage in deescalation techniques upon entry of Giron’s apartment.
- Officers failed to follow “use of deadly force” policies.
“The effort to serve the search warrant for stolen property quickly deteriorated into utter chaos, instantly transitioning from a controlled effort to secure the subject and search his unit into a Wild West-style shootout that tragically eventually resulted in the death of Mr. Giron, the death of SLOPD Officer Luca Benedetti, and injury to another officer, Defendant, SLOPD Detective Steve Orozco,” the lawsuit said.
SLOPD was aware of man’s mental health issues, lawsuit says
The COVID-19 pandemic was mentally and emotionally hard on Giron, especially from March through May 2020, the lawsuit said, when he was laid off from his job at The Pad, a climbing gym in San Luis Obispo.
After losing the job, he received negative social media messages that said he was “banned from the climbing community,” the lawsuit said.
Over the next few months, Giron’s mental health began to deteriorate, the lawsuit said, and SLOPD was called to respond to Giron at least 10 times. His family and friends tried to get Giron mental health help, but he continued to deteriorate, the lawsuit said.
“Law enforcement did not respond to these pleas for help, and in the aftermath of Mr. Giron’s death, local law enforcement, specifically the City of San Luis Obispo Police Department, publicly claimed it did not have any record of Mr. Giron’s mental illness,” the lawsuit alleged.
San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson also said at a May 11, 2021, news conference that there was “no indication of anything in our files of mental illness” related to Giron.
According to records obtained by The Tribune and the lawsuit, notes from a July 11, 2020, call for service say Giron was “exhibiting signs of mania and paranoia and requests welfare check,” the incident report reads. A note that runs off the page of the report also appears to say that Giron is “very skeptical” of police.
Other calls also note he was exhibiting “aberrant behavior.”
Law enforcement may have also been aware that Giron had firearms, the lawsuit alleges. It said when officers stopped by Giron’s apartment on May 8, they may have seen his three hunting rifles that were given to him by his late father.
The lawsuit alleges SLOPD and the SLO County Sheriff’s Office did not activate the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team and failed to use deescalation tactics, like crisis intervention training, to avoid a “violent conflict” and allow them to take Giron into custody if needed while they carried out the search warrant for stolen property.
“We will not comment on details still under investigation, but the City had no history of contacts with Mr. Giron during which he met legal criteria for an involuntary mental health hold,” Dietrick wrote in an email to The Tribune. “We do not know the extent to which he or his family sought social services or other professional mental health interventions outside the scope of police response.”
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Lawsuit alleges officers did not deescalate situation in line with policy
The first mistake law enforcement made, the lawsuit alleges, was not taking into account Giron’s past involvement with SLOPD regarding his mental health and carrying out a “dynamic entry,” by surrounding the apartment, announcing themselves, and breaking down the door.
This tactic violated police training and policies and procedures regarding situations with a mentally unstable subject experiencing a mental health crisis, the lawsuit alleges.
According to SLOPD’s use-of-force policy, officers need to use deescalation techniques, crisis intervention techniques and other alternatives when feasible “to avoid or reduce the need for force or minimize escalation of force” and should delay using force when possible by using verbal commands first.
Use of deadly force, according to the policy, is only justified if the officer believes there is a imminent threat of death or serious injury to themselves or another, or to apprehend “a fleeing person for any felony that threatened or resulted in death or serious bodily injury.”
Officers should not use deadly force against a person based on the danger that person poses to the officer if the person does not pose an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, the policy says.
Officials spread false narrative of shootout, lawsuit alleges
Caroline Wichman, Giron’s mother, previously filed a wrongful death administrative claim against the city and county accusing the Police Department of misconduct and a cover-up. The lawsuit says the law enforcement narrative is “spurious and intended to be purposefully misleading.”
“If the City wants to create and stick to a narrative that the officers involved were not at-fault in creating the situation and mismanaging it, then I suppose that they have the right to do so,” Kaufman said. “It seems that such a crafting of the narrative misses an opportunity to learn something about how to handle these types of encounters more skillfully and avoid a tragic outcome where an officer and a citizen are killed.“
Dietrick wrote in an email to The Tribune that the city denies advancing any false narrative.
“While we can certainly understand the loss Ms. Wichman must be experiencing as a mother and how difficult it must be for her to process her son’s actions in taking his own life and Detective Benedetti’s, the narrative advanced in the pleadings simply is not accurate,” she said.
The investigative documents, such as body camera footage, critical incident video and reports, have yet to be released to both the Giron family and the public.
The Giron family believes these records “will expose the false narrative that was put forward to disguise law enforcement’s failure to capably handle the service and execution of the search warrant,” the lawsuit said.
Tony Cipolla, spokesperson for the county Sheriff’s Office, confirmed to The Tribune in early May that the investigation of the incident was complete and has been turned over to the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office.
Kati Porter, records manager for the Sheriff’s Office, told The Tribune the records will not be public until the District Attorney’s Office completes its investigation.
California law, specifically Senate Bill 1421, requires that all investigative materials relating to use-of-force incidents be released to the public. Assembly Bill 748 allows audio and video recordings of “critical incidents,” like officer-involved shootings, to be withheld for 45 days if the records release would “substantially interfere” with the investigation.
Agencies can withhold these recordings for up to one year only if their disclosure would “substantially interfere” with an active criminal or administrative investigation, according to the law.
Clear and convincing evidence that disclosure would still interfere with investigation is required for agencies to withhold recordings of critical incidents beyond a year.
In response to a May public records request, Dietrick wrote in a letter to The Tribune that the public interest in non-disclosure outweighs the public interest in disclosure, and “would likely interfere with the personal recollections” of parties involved in the incident. She added that disclosing recordings depicting Benedetti’s death and Orozco’s injury is an invasion of privacy and would not be disclosed at all.
“It is unfortunate that the pain of that day will need to be relived through this baseless lawsuit, but the City will defend the action zealously to bring it to the quickest favorable resolution for benefit of the Benedetti family, Detective Orozco, the City, and its employees,” Dietrick wrote in a separate May email to The Tribune. “We are confident the facts will support that end.”
The lawsuit claims the refusal to release records is “calculated” and implicates public interest “in both transparency and the protection of individual rights in the face of government action that results in extrajudicial murder of a suspect involved in a property crime.”
“The importance of the lawsuit is mainly to figure out what exactly happened as the City and County are moving at a glacial pace with the investigation and have ostensibly stonewalled the multiple PRA requests,” Kaufman said. “Everyone would like to know what happened.”
This story was originally published August 12, 2022 at 12:00 PM.
