Reap the Whirlwind, page 22
“Well, did you think about maybe focusing on the fellow that you maybe thought was the Crip?”
“I don’t remember why I didn’t focus on him or if I was focused on him.”
“Did you think that it was possible that there was a gun in that truck and that somebody had it on them?”
“It was possible.”
“Okay, and you look at the driver and he’s wearing a white shirt and some dark pants, and you don’t pay any attention at all to the fellow wearing, quote, ‘classic Crip garb’?”
“I was looking all over the place. There was a lot of people in the truck getting out. I couldn’t narrow my attention to one. I would have liked to, but there was too many things going on.”
“Now, in this conversation that you had with the driver when the driver got out of the car, did it look to you like he was upset with you?”
“No. In fact, I remember thinking nothing keyed me as to what was going to happen.”
“Would it be unusual for you to approach a, quote, ‘truckload of Crips,’ and go up to the driver and say, ‘You claim Blood or Cuz?’”
“That wouldn’t be unusual, I don’t think,” Jacobs replied.
“Well,” Silverman said, “what we have here is a possibility . . . that you may have approached the driver and asked him, ‘Do you claim Blood or Cuz?’”
“I don’t remember saying that,” Jacobs answered.
When Jacobs described his reaction to Penn walking away from him, Silverman could barely disguise his incredulity. “When Penn said in a loud voice, angry voice, ‘Don’t touch me!’ over his shoulder, your response to that was to turn around and begin walking in the opposite direction?”
“I remember thinking I went along the passenger side of the truck. That is what my memory tells me.”
“When Mr. Penn turned and started to walk away, you didn’t grab him and spin him around and hit him?”
“I don’t remember if I did or not.”
“And you didn’t then pull out your stick and begin swinging at his head?”
“I don’t remember doing that. But I would never use the head as a target anyway as far as that goes.” He reiterated that he struck Penn hard across the back four or five times.
Silverman asked him to step down and demonstrate how he swung the baton at Penn. He handed Jacobs the PR-24 and turned his back to him. “Slow motion, if you would,” he said. “Just try to place the club where the club came across his back.” Jacobs demonstrated a forehand arm swing, resting the baton against the flank of Silverman’s back at a forty-five-degree angle. “Probably right across like that,” he said. Jacobs demonstrated a backhand swing, connecting on the opposite flank of the back at a similarly expected angle. Together, the rod-shaped areas of contact created a V shape on a subject’s back.
“And you hit him as hard as you could?”
“I hit him hard. Not as hard as I could, but I did hit him hard.”
“What was your objective in hitting him?”
“To cause him to cease the attack on Tom. To install pain where it became counterproductive for him to continue the attack.”
“You are right-handed?” Silverman asked.
“Yes.”
“And Riggs is left-handed?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it true that you were at the front of the truck, and that it was Tom Riggs who came around the other side of the truck with his baton and struck Mr. Penn on the back?”
“I remember coming around the side of the truck. That is what I remember.”
Silverman retrieved a large blowup of a photograph and placed it on an easel. “Officer Jacobs . . . this is a photograph of Mr. Penn’s back, and to my somewhat-feeble mind, it looks like the person that inflicted the blows across the back was left-handed and was striking in this fashion.” Holding the PR-24 in his left hand, he simulated the same forehand and backhand swings Jacobs had moments before. The resulting contact points matched the angles of the bruises seen on Penn’s back. He switched the baton to his right hand and repeated the motion from that side. “If you had struck Mr. Penn across the shoulders in this fashion, I would have expected that we see a somewhat different pattern of injuries on the back.” He looked at Jacobs. “Wouldn’t you agree with me?”
“I agree,” Jacobs answered without hesitation.
“Does the photograph at all help refresh your recollection as to whether it was Thomas Riggs or you who came around the truck and began striking Mr. Penn in the back?”
“No,” Jacobs said.
“The absolute next event that you can recall is that you are on top of him on the ground?”
“That is what I remember, yes.”
Silverman moved to the giant diagram of the scene. “We have some physical evidence, Officer Jacobs . . . and some testimony that you and Mr. Penn wound up down here in this area by Agent Riggs’s patrol car. You can see that coming from this location, we have got twenty, forty, you know, maybe fifty feet or so as this thing is going down the driveway.” He lowered the pointer and turned back to Jacobs. “Can you help us at all in telling us what might have happened between this point and this point?”
“I just remember what I said. The next thing I remember I was on top of him.”
With his cross-examination resuming following day, Silverman questioned Jacobs about his role on the PCP street unit and expertise in recognizing signs of drug use. He went through the list of all indicators of PCP use. Jacobs had not recognized any on Penn other than the absence of a reaction to the initial baton strikes. The clear implication from Silverman was that Jacobs knew damn well he was not engaged in a fight with someone on PCP.
He questioned Jacobs about the need for the Reverse Garrity immunity and his insistence that his attorney James Gattey be present at all interviews with Manis. Jacobs said it was Gattey, not he, who insisted on both. “And does Mr. Gattey represent you in a $5 million lawsuit that you have filed against Mr. Penn?” he asked, holding a copy of the seven-page document Gattey filed one week earlier.
“Yes,” Jacobs confirmed.
Silverman located a section in the document. “Officer Jacobs, in this paragraph you indicate that the plaintiff—that is you—was attempting to arrest the defendant—that is Mr. Penn—and that he willfully and unlawfully committed a battery upon you by striking you and then removing your service revolver and shooting you.” Silverman lowered the document. “Now, I had understood from your testimony yesterday that you did not recall Mr. Penn ever striking you. And I am wondering if this document which was filed by your attorney refreshes your recollection as to whether Mr. Penn in fact struck you?”
“This document was prepared by my attorney independently. I didn’t assist in the preparation of it. I stand by what I said yesterday; I do not recall Mr. Penn hitting me.”
Silverman asked why he chose to punch Penn when he thought Penn might be grabbing for his gun. “Why not grab your gun and make sure you have got it in your holster or secured, or step back off of him and pull the gun out and say, ‘Don’t move’?”
“I can’t argue with that,” Jacobs conceded.
“Did you hit Mr. Penn in the face?”
“I may have,” Jacobs said.
Silverman moved on. “You mentioned yesterday, Officer Jacobs, that you never used racial slurs.”
“That is correct.”
“Never in your police work have you ever used racial slurs?”
“That is correct.”
“You wouldn’t be confused about that at all, would you?”
“Not a doubt.”
“There either are, or will be, witnesses that have, or will, state that they heard you say while you were on top of Mr. Penn striking him with your fists, ‘You think you’re bad, boy? I am going to beat your Black ass.’ Or ‘You think you are bad, nigger? I am going to beat your Black ass.’ Words to that effect. Those aren’t words that you would say?”
“No, they are not,” Jacobs said.
“Are you sure you didn’t say them?” Silverman pressed.
“I am positive I did not say them. I know myself real well.”
Silverman switched to the transcript of the second Mercy Hospital interview with Bob Manis, and he read a quote from Jacobs about the apparent inaccuracies in his first statement to the detective: “So, you know, I mean, I don’t have any reason to lie about that, you know.”
Silverman looked up from transcript. “Is it true that you didn’t have a reason to lie about why you stopped that truck?”
“That’s correct,” said Jacobs.
“If you knew in your own mind somewhere deep inside that you didn’t have a reason for stopping that truck, you wouldn’t lie about why you stopped it?”
“No, I had a reason to stop the truck,” Jacobs said.
“You wouldn’t have any reason, would you Officer Jacobs, to lie about whether it was you or Tom Riggs that became involved in that initial confrontation and physical altercation with Sagon Penn?”
“No reason at all.”
“You wouldn’t have a reason even if, in fact, assuming Mr. Penn turned around in frustration, you grabbed him and turned him around and hit him and then drew your club and began swinging at his head with your baton?”
“I didn’t do that,” Jacobs responded.
“But if you had and you knew you had, you wouldn’t make up a lie that it was Riggs that was involved in this initial altercation, would you?”
“I would not lie,” Jacob said. “I would not put something on somebody else.”
“Isn’t it true that what you have done, Officer Jacobs, is that you sat in that [hospital] room and you realized that you had done something wrong at the side of the truck with Mr. Penn, beginning an attack and an assault on him, and that you made this up about going around this side of the truck to cut Mr. Penn off because you knew there were witnesses there that saw an altercation and you wanted that altercation to be between Tom Riggs and not with you?”
“I didn’t make anything up and I didn’t attack Mr. Penn.”
“And there is no confusion in your mind on that at all, is there?”
“In my mind I have no doubt that I did not do what you said, that I lied,” Jacobs replied.
“And you are sure of that?”
“I know myself pretty well,” Jacob said. “I did not attack Mr. Penn.”
“No matter how many witnesses might have seen it another way?”
“They can tell you what they saw. They can view it as an attack. What I did was what I was trained to do, and that is it. I did not go into excess.”
FOLLOWING HIS TESTIMONY, Jacobs had an exclusive television interview with reporter Doug Curlee, himself an ex-cop who had been shot in the line of duty. Seated in the now-empty courtroom, Jacobs expressed his own opinion about his two days on the stand. “I think it went really well,” he said. “I’m really tired, you know, from just sitting up there and the emotional strain.” He offered his thoughts on Milt Silverman’s strategy: “From day one it’s been Donovan Jacobs who is on trial. People have this perception that I’m some kind of animal or something, a Doberman pinscher I think was the term. I’m not, I’m just a hardworking cop.”
20
MIKE CARPENTER SAVED WHO HE BELIEVED TO BE HIS strongest eyewitness for last. Sarah Pina-Ruiz was the only person to provide a detailed description of how Sagon Penn retrieved Donovan Jacobs’s gun and then shot three people, including her. It was not good news for Carpenter that six weeks before, the one person he felt most likely to absolve Donovan Jacobs of responsibility for the incident had filed a lawsuit blaming him for it.
The civil suit filed on February 26, 1986, on behalf of Sarah Pina-Ruiz alleged the San Diego Police Department endangered her safety and was responsible for almost getting her killed. The “Personal Injury Complaint” asserted that “Officer Riggs introduced a civilian ‘ride-along’ into an obviously dangerous situation, one involving a suspected armed gang member.” She claimed to have asked Riggs to drop her off if he thought the search for the gang member with a gun could be dangerous. He purportedly declined. The complaint also alleged, “Officer Jacobs conducted his detention in such a manner as to result in a violent reaction which he was unable to control.”
Sarah Pina-Ruiz took the witness stand immediately following Donovan Jacobs. She appeared composed and confident in a pink blazer with wide shoulders over a white linen blouse, her dark hair parted on the left and feathered back from her face. All of Pina-Ruiz’s observations had been made while in the passenger seat of Riggs’s vehicle with the windows rolled up. The patrol unit was positioned forty to fifty feet away from Penn’s pickup, with a partially obscured view, so the initial interaction and physical confrontation unfolded for her like a silent movie. Her descriptions of those events were mostly consistent with what others had seen. Like most, she could not say exactly what caused it to erupt into a physical confrontation.
She had a clear view of the altercation once it began moving down the driveway in her direction. “They were just like scuffling and they scuffled and scuffled,” she said, never referring to it as a “fight.” Jacobs, and to a lesser extent Riggs, swung at Penn with their batons, she said, but Penn blocked almost all of them with what looked like some type of martial arts. She said Riggs struck Penn once hard across the back with his PR-24 baton, to which Penn had no reaction whatsoever: “Not a flinch, not a surprised look, nothing.” She described Penn also hitting back “several times,” mostly at Jacobs. “They just landed where he could hit him at,” she said of the blows.
She thought Jacobs and Penn fell to the ground due to a slip or tangling of feet and that Jacobs ended up on top by “fate or accident.” She drew a stick figure on a diagram to represent the position of Penn on the ground just outside the driver’s side door of Riggs’s vehicle. It showed Penn with his feet close to the car door and his body at a forty-five-degree angle pointing up the driveway. “When he was on the ground and Agent [Jacobs] was on top of him, was there anything obstructing your view of him?” Carpenter asked.
“No. There is a little piece in the middle of the police car that I scooted myself up on,” she said, referring to the center console.
From that vantage point, Pina-Ruiz reported seeing Penn flailing his arms while Riggs and Jacobs tried to control him. Through the closed window she could hear Jacobs ordering Penn to turn over. But then the situation seemed to calm down, as though things were getting under control. “I was sitting in the car, and I felt this calm,” she said. “I was more relaxed. I could tell the crowd is more relaxed. And I believe that the driver and Officer Jacobs [were] even more relaxed. They’re talking. Officer Jacobs was trying to tell him to put his hands behind his back and cooperate, that type of thing. And the driver kept saying, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?’ Then I noticed the driver looking at Officer Jacobs’s pistol.” She remembered thinking, “He’s not going to grab that gun.”
“What happened next?” Carpenter asked.
“Then he went after the gun,” she said.
“Officer Jacobs had the driver around the neck with his clothing,” she continued, “and the driver had the pistol pointed up between his arms.” She said Penn moved the gun “several times upward” until he held it to the left side of Jacobs’s neck. “I saw the trigger going back, and then my eyes went right to the hammer, and I saw the hammer going back.”
“Did you see the hammer actually go back as a result of the pulling of the trigger?” Carpenter asked, holding Jacobs’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. “Yes,” she said. “I saw blood splatter back.”
Carpenter pulled the trigger. The hammer went back and then snapped forward with a sharp click. He extended an arm and pointed accusingly in the direction of Sagon Penn. “It was his hand that pulled the trigger that shot Agent Jacobs?”
“Yes, it was.”
Carpenter moved on to the shooting of Tom Riggs. Pina-Ruiz described how Riggs turned his body away from the noise of the crowd while speaking on his portable radio. “When the shot went out, he turned around and he was just, what I would say, dumbfounded.”
“At that time was the PR-24 still in Agent Riggs’s left hand and the radio in his right hand?” Carpenter asked.
“Yes, it was.”
“What is the next thing you saw or heard?”
Penn was still lying on his back, she said. “I saw the driver lean back and pull the gun up, and shoot.”
“Did you ever see Riggs go for his gun?”
“No. Because I know both his hands were full. He would have had to drop something, and he still had both items in his hands.”
“At the time he was shot?”
“At the time,” she affirmed.
She said after the first gunshot at Riggs, “I was searching in the car for anything that might protect me in some way.” But Penn suddenly appeared outside the driver’s side window. “We had eye contact. Then the next thing I looked at was the barrel of the gun, and I knew he was going to shoot me in the face.”
“Did you feel fear then?” Carpenter asked.
“Yes.”
“What was that fear of?”
“Being dead.”
Pina-Ruiz described twisting her body away from the gun barrel and lifting an arm to shield her face. Two gunshots went off in rapid succession, and she knew she had been hit. She thought the gunman still had a sixth bullet, and she waited for him to fire the last round. It never came. She slumped down in the seat and played dead until she heard Penn drive away. When she heard the car tires leave the dirt driveway, she radioed for help. Carpenter played the police radio traffic of Pina-Ruiz calling for help, as the eyes of some jurors welled up with tears.
Carpenter abruptly changed subjects. “I want to talk a little bit about the word nigger.” he said. Pina-Ruiz stared back at him flatly. “You have heard the word before, is that right?”
“Heard it, yes,” she said.
“Are you sensitive to that word?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I was married to a Black man, and I have two Black children.”
“I don’t remember why I didn’t focus on him or if I was focused on him.”
“Did you think that it was possible that there was a gun in that truck and that somebody had it on them?”
“It was possible.”
“Okay, and you look at the driver and he’s wearing a white shirt and some dark pants, and you don’t pay any attention at all to the fellow wearing, quote, ‘classic Crip garb’?”
“I was looking all over the place. There was a lot of people in the truck getting out. I couldn’t narrow my attention to one. I would have liked to, but there was too many things going on.”
“Now, in this conversation that you had with the driver when the driver got out of the car, did it look to you like he was upset with you?”
“No. In fact, I remember thinking nothing keyed me as to what was going to happen.”
“Would it be unusual for you to approach a, quote, ‘truckload of Crips,’ and go up to the driver and say, ‘You claim Blood or Cuz?’”
“That wouldn’t be unusual, I don’t think,” Jacobs replied.
“Well,” Silverman said, “what we have here is a possibility . . . that you may have approached the driver and asked him, ‘Do you claim Blood or Cuz?’”
“I don’t remember saying that,” Jacobs answered.
When Jacobs described his reaction to Penn walking away from him, Silverman could barely disguise his incredulity. “When Penn said in a loud voice, angry voice, ‘Don’t touch me!’ over his shoulder, your response to that was to turn around and begin walking in the opposite direction?”
“I remember thinking I went along the passenger side of the truck. That is what my memory tells me.”
“When Mr. Penn turned and started to walk away, you didn’t grab him and spin him around and hit him?”
“I don’t remember if I did or not.”
“And you didn’t then pull out your stick and begin swinging at his head?”
“I don’t remember doing that. But I would never use the head as a target anyway as far as that goes.” He reiterated that he struck Penn hard across the back four or five times.
Silverman asked him to step down and demonstrate how he swung the baton at Penn. He handed Jacobs the PR-24 and turned his back to him. “Slow motion, if you would,” he said. “Just try to place the club where the club came across his back.” Jacobs demonstrated a forehand arm swing, resting the baton against the flank of Silverman’s back at a forty-five-degree angle. “Probably right across like that,” he said. Jacobs demonstrated a backhand swing, connecting on the opposite flank of the back at a similarly expected angle. Together, the rod-shaped areas of contact created a V shape on a subject’s back.
“And you hit him as hard as you could?”
“I hit him hard. Not as hard as I could, but I did hit him hard.”
“What was your objective in hitting him?”
“To cause him to cease the attack on Tom. To install pain where it became counterproductive for him to continue the attack.”
“You are right-handed?” Silverman asked.
“Yes.”
“And Riggs is left-handed?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it true that you were at the front of the truck, and that it was Tom Riggs who came around the other side of the truck with his baton and struck Mr. Penn on the back?”
“I remember coming around the side of the truck. That is what I remember.”
Silverman retrieved a large blowup of a photograph and placed it on an easel. “Officer Jacobs . . . this is a photograph of Mr. Penn’s back, and to my somewhat-feeble mind, it looks like the person that inflicted the blows across the back was left-handed and was striking in this fashion.” Holding the PR-24 in his left hand, he simulated the same forehand and backhand swings Jacobs had moments before. The resulting contact points matched the angles of the bruises seen on Penn’s back. He switched the baton to his right hand and repeated the motion from that side. “If you had struck Mr. Penn across the shoulders in this fashion, I would have expected that we see a somewhat different pattern of injuries on the back.” He looked at Jacobs. “Wouldn’t you agree with me?”
“I agree,” Jacobs answered without hesitation.
“Does the photograph at all help refresh your recollection as to whether it was Thomas Riggs or you who came around the truck and began striking Mr. Penn in the back?”
“No,” Jacobs said.
“The absolute next event that you can recall is that you are on top of him on the ground?”
“That is what I remember, yes.”
Silverman moved to the giant diagram of the scene. “We have some physical evidence, Officer Jacobs . . . and some testimony that you and Mr. Penn wound up down here in this area by Agent Riggs’s patrol car. You can see that coming from this location, we have got twenty, forty, you know, maybe fifty feet or so as this thing is going down the driveway.” He lowered the pointer and turned back to Jacobs. “Can you help us at all in telling us what might have happened between this point and this point?”
“I just remember what I said. The next thing I remember I was on top of him.”
With his cross-examination resuming following day, Silverman questioned Jacobs about his role on the PCP street unit and expertise in recognizing signs of drug use. He went through the list of all indicators of PCP use. Jacobs had not recognized any on Penn other than the absence of a reaction to the initial baton strikes. The clear implication from Silverman was that Jacobs knew damn well he was not engaged in a fight with someone on PCP.
He questioned Jacobs about the need for the Reverse Garrity immunity and his insistence that his attorney James Gattey be present at all interviews with Manis. Jacobs said it was Gattey, not he, who insisted on both. “And does Mr. Gattey represent you in a $5 million lawsuit that you have filed against Mr. Penn?” he asked, holding a copy of the seven-page document Gattey filed one week earlier.
“Yes,” Jacobs confirmed.
Silverman located a section in the document. “Officer Jacobs, in this paragraph you indicate that the plaintiff—that is you—was attempting to arrest the defendant—that is Mr. Penn—and that he willfully and unlawfully committed a battery upon you by striking you and then removing your service revolver and shooting you.” Silverman lowered the document. “Now, I had understood from your testimony yesterday that you did not recall Mr. Penn ever striking you. And I am wondering if this document which was filed by your attorney refreshes your recollection as to whether Mr. Penn in fact struck you?”
“This document was prepared by my attorney independently. I didn’t assist in the preparation of it. I stand by what I said yesterday; I do not recall Mr. Penn hitting me.”
Silverman asked why he chose to punch Penn when he thought Penn might be grabbing for his gun. “Why not grab your gun and make sure you have got it in your holster or secured, or step back off of him and pull the gun out and say, ‘Don’t move’?”
“I can’t argue with that,” Jacobs conceded.
“Did you hit Mr. Penn in the face?”
“I may have,” Jacobs said.
Silverman moved on. “You mentioned yesterday, Officer Jacobs, that you never used racial slurs.”
“That is correct.”
“Never in your police work have you ever used racial slurs?”
“That is correct.”
“You wouldn’t be confused about that at all, would you?”
“Not a doubt.”
“There either are, or will be, witnesses that have, or will, state that they heard you say while you were on top of Mr. Penn striking him with your fists, ‘You think you’re bad, boy? I am going to beat your Black ass.’ Or ‘You think you are bad, nigger? I am going to beat your Black ass.’ Words to that effect. Those aren’t words that you would say?”
“No, they are not,” Jacobs said.
“Are you sure you didn’t say them?” Silverman pressed.
“I am positive I did not say them. I know myself real well.”
Silverman switched to the transcript of the second Mercy Hospital interview with Bob Manis, and he read a quote from Jacobs about the apparent inaccuracies in his first statement to the detective: “So, you know, I mean, I don’t have any reason to lie about that, you know.”
Silverman looked up from transcript. “Is it true that you didn’t have a reason to lie about why you stopped that truck?”
“That’s correct,” said Jacobs.
“If you knew in your own mind somewhere deep inside that you didn’t have a reason for stopping that truck, you wouldn’t lie about why you stopped it?”
“No, I had a reason to stop the truck,” Jacobs said.
“You wouldn’t have any reason, would you Officer Jacobs, to lie about whether it was you or Tom Riggs that became involved in that initial confrontation and physical altercation with Sagon Penn?”
“No reason at all.”
“You wouldn’t have a reason even if, in fact, assuming Mr. Penn turned around in frustration, you grabbed him and turned him around and hit him and then drew your club and began swinging at his head with your baton?”
“I didn’t do that,” Jacobs responded.
“But if you had and you knew you had, you wouldn’t make up a lie that it was Riggs that was involved in this initial altercation, would you?”
“I would not lie,” Jacob said. “I would not put something on somebody else.”
“Isn’t it true that what you have done, Officer Jacobs, is that you sat in that [hospital] room and you realized that you had done something wrong at the side of the truck with Mr. Penn, beginning an attack and an assault on him, and that you made this up about going around this side of the truck to cut Mr. Penn off because you knew there were witnesses there that saw an altercation and you wanted that altercation to be between Tom Riggs and not with you?”
“I didn’t make anything up and I didn’t attack Mr. Penn.”
“And there is no confusion in your mind on that at all, is there?”
“In my mind I have no doubt that I did not do what you said, that I lied,” Jacobs replied.
“And you are sure of that?”
“I know myself pretty well,” Jacob said. “I did not attack Mr. Penn.”
“No matter how many witnesses might have seen it another way?”
“They can tell you what they saw. They can view it as an attack. What I did was what I was trained to do, and that is it. I did not go into excess.”
FOLLOWING HIS TESTIMONY, Jacobs had an exclusive television interview with reporter Doug Curlee, himself an ex-cop who had been shot in the line of duty. Seated in the now-empty courtroom, Jacobs expressed his own opinion about his two days on the stand. “I think it went really well,” he said. “I’m really tired, you know, from just sitting up there and the emotional strain.” He offered his thoughts on Milt Silverman’s strategy: “From day one it’s been Donovan Jacobs who is on trial. People have this perception that I’m some kind of animal or something, a Doberman pinscher I think was the term. I’m not, I’m just a hardworking cop.”
20
MIKE CARPENTER SAVED WHO HE BELIEVED TO BE HIS strongest eyewitness for last. Sarah Pina-Ruiz was the only person to provide a detailed description of how Sagon Penn retrieved Donovan Jacobs’s gun and then shot three people, including her. It was not good news for Carpenter that six weeks before, the one person he felt most likely to absolve Donovan Jacobs of responsibility for the incident had filed a lawsuit blaming him for it.
The civil suit filed on February 26, 1986, on behalf of Sarah Pina-Ruiz alleged the San Diego Police Department endangered her safety and was responsible for almost getting her killed. The “Personal Injury Complaint” asserted that “Officer Riggs introduced a civilian ‘ride-along’ into an obviously dangerous situation, one involving a suspected armed gang member.” She claimed to have asked Riggs to drop her off if he thought the search for the gang member with a gun could be dangerous. He purportedly declined. The complaint also alleged, “Officer Jacobs conducted his detention in such a manner as to result in a violent reaction which he was unable to control.”
Sarah Pina-Ruiz took the witness stand immediately following Donovan Jacobs. She appeared composed and confident in a pink blazer with wide shoulders over a white linen blouse, her dark hair parted on the left and feathered back from her face. All of Pina-Ruiz’s observations had been made while in the passenger seat of Riggs’s vehicle with the windows rolled up. The patrol unit was positioned forty to fifty feet away from Penn’s pickup, with a partially obscured view, so the initial interaction and physical confrontation unfolded for her like a silent movie. Her descriptions of those events were mostly consistent with what others had seen. Like most, she could not say exactly what caused it to erupt into a physical confrontation.
She had a clear view of the altercation once it began moving down the driveway in her direction. “They were just like scuffling and they scuffled and scuffled,” she said, never referring to it as a “fight.” Jacobs, and to a lesser extent Riggs, swung at Penn with their batons, she said, but Penn blocked almost all of them with what looked like some type of martial arts. She said Riggs struck Penn once hard across the back with his PR-24 baton, to which Penn had no reaction whatsoever: “Not a flinch, not a surprised look, nothing.” She described Penn also hitting back “several times,” mostly at Jacobs. “They just landed where he could hit him at,” she said of the blows.
She thought Jacobs and Penn fell to the ground due to a slip or tangling of feet and that Jacobs ended up on top by “fate or accident.” She drew a stick figure on a diagram to represent the position of Penn on the ground just outside the driver’s side door of Riggs’s vehicle. It showed Penn with his feet close to the car door and his body at a forty-five-degree angle pointing up the driveway. “When he was on the ground and Agent [Jacobs] was on top of him, was there anything obstructing your view of him?” Carpenter asked.
“No. There is a little piece in the middle of the police car that I scooted myself up on,” she said, referring to the center console.
From that vantage point, Pina-Ruiz reported seeing Penn flailing his arms while Riggs and Jacobs tried to control him. Through the closed window she could hear Jacobs ordering Penn to turn over. But then the situation seemed to calm down, as though things were getting under control. “I was sitting in the car, and I felt this calm,” she said. “I was more relaxed. I could tell the crowd is more relaxed. And I believe that the driver and Officer Jacobs [were] even more relaxed. They’re talking. Officer Jacobs was trying to tell him to put his hands behind his back and cooperate, that type of thing. And the driver kept saying, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?’ Then I noticed the driver looking at Officer Jacobs’s pistol.” She remembered thinking, “He’s not going to grab that gun.”
“What happened next?” Carpenter asked.
“Then he went after the gun,” she said.
“Officer Jacobs had the driver around the neck with his clothing,” she continued, “and the driver had the pistol pointed up between his arms.” She said Penn moved the gun “several times upward” until he held it to the left side of Jacobs’s neck. “I saw the trigger going back, and then my eyes went right to the hammer, and I saw the hammer going back.”
“Did you see the hammer actually go back as a result of the pulling of the trigger?” Carpenter asked, holding Jacobs’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. “Yes,” she said. “I saw blood splatter back.”
Carpenter pulled the trigger. The hammer went back and then snapped forward with a sharp click. He extended an arm and pointed accusingly in the direction of Sagon Penn. “It was his hand that pulled the trigger that shot Agent Jacobs?”
“Yes, it was.”
Carpenter moved on to the shooting of Tom Riggs. Pina-Ruiz described how Riggs turned his body away from the noise of the crowd while speaking on his portable radio. “When the shot went out, he turned around and he was just, what I would say, dumbfounded.”
“At that time was the PR-24 still in Agent Riggs’s left hand and the radio in his right hand?” Carpenter asked.
“Yes, it was.”
“What is the next thing you saw or heard?”
Penn was still lying on his back, she said. “I saw the driver lean back and pull the gun up, and shoot.”
“Did you ever see Riggs go for his gun?”
“No. Because I know both his hands were full. He would have had to drop something, and he still had both items in his hands.”
“At the time he was shot?”
“At the time,” she affirmed.
She said after the first gunshot at Riggs, “I was searching in the car for anything that might protect me in some way.” But Penn suddenly appeared outside the driver’s side window. “We had eye contact. Then the next thing I looked at was the barrel of the gun, and I knew he was going to shoot me in the face.”
“Did you feel fear then?” Carpenter asked.
“Yes.”
“What was that fear of?”
“Being dead.”
Pina-Ruiz described twisting her body away from the gun barrel and lifting an arm to shield her face. Two gunshots went off in rapid succession, and she knew she had been hit. She thought the gunman still had a sixth bullet, and she waited for him to fire the last round. It never came. She slumped down in the seat and played dead until she heard Penn drive away. When she heard the car tires leave the dirt driveway, she radioed for help. Carpenter played the police radio traffic of Pina-Ruiz calling for help, as the eyes of some jurors welled up with tears.
Carpenter abruptly changed subjects. “I want to talk a little bit about the word nigger.” he said. Pina-Ruiz stared back at him flatly. “You have heard the word before, is that right?”
“Heard it, yes,” she said.
“Are you sensitive to that word?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I was married to a Black man, and I have two Black children.”
