Manslaughter charges were officially dismissed Thursday against two former Torrance police officers charged in the 2018 shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a car theft suspect who was holding an air rifle at the time he was killed.
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman announced his intention to drop the case, which was filed by his predecessor late last year. But Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta delayed a decision on the motion to dismiss due to a number of technical issues over the past six months, before finally ending the case against Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez on Thursday morning.
Concannon and Chavez were indicted in 2023 for killing Mitchell, 23, in 2018. Mitchell was sitting in his car in a supermarket with an air rifle between his knees at the time he was killed. While Mitchell never pointed the weapon at either officer, Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed was a real gun when he opened fire, according to court records.
The case spanned three district attorney’s office administrations. Then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey initially cleared the officers of wrongdoing, but Dist. Atty. George Gascón reopened the case and assigned a special prosecutor to review her decision. A grand jury indicted both men in 2023.
Both officers were investigated amid a racist text-messaging scandal within the Torrance Police Department in 2021, where more than a dozen officers were found to have shared a litany of texts replete with antisemitic and homophobic slurs, promises of violence against Black suspects and jokes about use of excessive force. Concanon was ultimately found not to have sent any racist texts. Chavez did send several messages, according to the district attorney’s office’s motion to dismiss the charges.
Mitchell was Black, and activists have suggested the texts prove racial animus played a role in the case. In one string of messages, officers used the N-word to describe Mitchell’s relatives and joked about what would happen after Concannon and Chavez’s names were made public.
“Gun cleaning party at my house when they release my name??” Chavez asked, according to the dismissal motion.
“Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another replied, according to a district attorney’s office report on the text messages made public during a separate court proceeding in 2022.
The dismissal played out before a half-full courtroom, with Mitchell’s mother flanked by organizers from Black Lives Matter L.A. and other police accountability activists. In the back row sat several supporters of Concannon and Chavez, including a Torrance police officer in full uniform.
“Please stop protecting them when they’re doing wrong. Because when you do that, it breaks the trust of the people,” Mitchell’s mother, Sherilyn Haines, pleaded to Ohta before he ruled. “They’re going to keep on killing our kids with the same ‘We feared for our life’ speech.”
When Ohta finished reading his 34-page ruling, several protesters chanted Mitchell’s name and yelled at Concannon, calling him a “murderer.” Chavez did not attend the hearing.
Mitchell’s family was awarded $7.8 million to settle a wrongful death suit in 2022, shortly after a judge granted their discovery request for records tied to the “text message scandal” dating back to 2016.
The family’s civil attorney, Peter Carr, questioned the rationale behind Hochman’s move to dismiss, arguing prosecutors had been “shifting justification for a pre-determined conclusion” across multiple filings. He noted their initial motion to dismiss argued Ohta had disallowed critical evidence in the case. Ohta later said the district attorney’s description was inaccurate.
In granting the motion, however, Ohta said he found no objective evidence that the district attorney’s office was dismissing the case in bad faith.
“I am profoundly pleased that this nightmare is finally over for my client,” said Concannon’s attorney, Tom Yu. “Police officers all over this country must make split-second decisions every day and unfortunately, some decisions include the use of deadly force.”
Yu said he believed the shooting was “completely justified.”
The officers’ attorneys have long argued Gascón overstepped his bounds in reopening the case and that the independent prosecutor he hired, Lawrence Middleton, had made several missteps in filing charges.
A report generated last year by a special prosecutor Hochman hired to review cases Gascón reopened found that Middleton failed to present relevant exculpatory evidence to grand jurors and improperly instructed the panel on the elements of the crime of voluntary manslaughter.
Middleton, who was fired by Hochman shortly after his 2024 election, was present in court but declined to comment.
Hochman has faced criticism for his handling of police use-of-force cases, with some questioning his decisions to offer lenient plea deals and dismiss charges against several officers. Last month, however, Hochman charged a California Highway Patrol Officer with murder after he caused an on-duty crash that contributed to multiple deaths.
