LAPD Gets Away with Two More Murders:
Omar Abrego’s Killers Go Free and Alesia Thomas’ Killer Gets Slap on Wrist

 

July 27, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Omar Abrego

On July 21, the Los Angeles Police Commission announced that the cops who chased Omar Abrego, a Mexican immigrant and father of three, smashed his head on the sidewalk, and beat and stomped on him so badly he was taken to intensive care, only to die a few hours later—did nothing wrong.

The autopsy—which the police refused to release for six months after they murdered Omar Abrego in August 2014—described Abrego as having significant cranial facial swelling and bleeding under the skin; a large laceration over his left eyebrow, and multiple contusions and abrasions on his body and arms and legs. He also had a severe concussion. All of this is consistent with the accounts of eyewitnesses who described the cops repeatedly punching and striking him with fists and clubs. A video of the beating shows a pool of blood under his head.

But all this meant nothing to the Police Commission. The coroner’s report calling his death a homicide meant nothing either. In the end, they blamed Abrego’s death not on the pigs who chased him down, stomped on him, and put him in intensive care but on the supposed effects of cocaine, while listing the “physical and emotional duress” caused by the beating a “contributing factor.”

Omar Abrego was murdered only six days before the August 9, 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

 

Alesia Thomas

On July 24, a judge sentenced an LAPD cop—who had been convicted in May by a jury of “assault under color of authority”—to 36 months in jail, with the last 20 of those months suspended. According to the Los Angeles Times, she could be released within five months with good behavior.

What was that assault? In 2012, Officer Mary O’Callaghan was caught on dashboard cameras beating, striking in the throat, and repeatedly stomping on the genitals of a woman shackled hand and foot in the back of a patrol car. Alesia Thomas had been trying to comply. Then she can be heard saying, “I can’t move; I can’t breathe” as she’s being shoved in the back of the car. At one point the cop tells Thomas she’ll be “crushed” if she doesn’t do what she’s told and then repeatedly kicks her in the groin. When she’s done, O’Callaghan laughs to her buddies, saying she has to go have a cigarette—meanwhile, Thomas is slipping into unconsciousness.

O’Callaghan, who spent 13 years in the Marines and now 18 with the LAPD, was amply trained to carry out wanton murder. But she never faced a murder charge. Once again, they used the coroner’s report, which said that they found cocaine in Thomas’ system, to claim that it wasn’t possible to determine what role the struggle with the cops who arrested her played in her death.

Nearly a year from the time the people of Ferguson, Missouri awakened the country by standing up and declaring “No More,” we’re seeing the powers-that-be in one case after another giving their answer—killer police are still being set free, sending the message that the wanton brutality of the enforcers of this murderous system has the full backing of the rulers who control them and rely on them. For the people, each new outrage has to fuel our determination to be rid of this system once and for all—and to make the nationwide outpouring against police murder called for October 22—24 a big step toward that.

 

 

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