An unusual civil trial set to begin Monday will determine whether the Austin Police Department fostered a “culture of officer impunity” that contributed to the fatal shooting of a civilian.
The case centers on the 2021 death of Alex Gonzales Jr., who was shot by two Austin police officers following a road rage incident. In a federal lawsuit against the city of Austin and one of the involved officers, Gonzales’ parents invoke a rarely successful legal doctrine known as the “Monell Standard” that allows cities to be held liable if systemic misconduct is proven.
Legal experts say it is exceedingly rare for Monell lawsuits to make it to trial.
The last time it happened in Austin was 2005, said local criminal defense attorney Skip Davis, who has represented plaintiffs in cases against law enforcement. The plaintiffs lost, he said.
UCLA law school professor Joanna Schwartz, who studies civil litigation against law enforcement officers, said Monell cases are almost always settled, withdrawn or dismissed before they make it to a courtroom.
When they do, plaintiffs rarely prevail, she said. That’s because the claims are so difficult to prove.
“Plaintiffs have to show a pattern of constitutional rights violations,” Schwartz said. “But the kind of facts that show a pattern can be difficult to come by.”
Yet in March, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama-appointee who is presiding over the case, ruled that Gonzales’ parents presented “sufficient evidence” to justify their claims against the city.
“The court finds that plaintiffs have offered sufficient evidence to show that the city had a practice of permitting excessive force by under-investigating and under-disciplining the majority of officers who engaged in excessive force,” Pitman wrote in his March 27 opinion. “The court also finds that a reasonable jury could find that such a practice created a culture of officer impunity.”
City spokesperson David Ochsner declined to comment on the specifics of the case but said “the city looks forward to presenting its case to a jury.”
The Road Rage Incident
Shortly after midnight on Jan. 5, 2021, Gonzales engaged with off-duty APD officer Gabriel Gutierrez in a road rage incident in southeast Austin. Gonzales was driving home with his girlfriend, Jessica Arellano, and their infant son while Gutierrez was driving home from the gym.
The confrontation escalated when the two men pulled up alongside each other at the intersection of Oltorf Street and Wickersham Lane, where video surveillance cameras at a nearby apartment complex caught part of the interaction.
The men began shouting at each other through open car windows, according to deposition testimony from Arellano and Gutierrez.
Arellano said she turned away from Gutierrez and told Gonzales to drive off when Gutierrez began firing into the couple’s vehicle, hitting Gonzales in the head and Arellano in her arm, back and shoulder.
Gutierrez claims that he opened fire only after Gonzales aimed a gun at him, though that part of the interaction was not captured on video and Arellano testified that she wasn’t looking at Gonzales at the time so couldn’t say if he had brandished a gun.
Moments later, Gutierrez dialed 911 and told the dispatcher he was a police officer who had been involved in a shooting with an armed man. He did not say that he shot Gonzales.
When APD Officer Luis Serrato and another officer arrived on the scene, Gutierrez reiterated that Gonzales was armed.
Footage from body-worn cameras captured the rest of the interaction, which Pitman described in his March ruling.
Serrato and the other officer commanded Gonzales to move toward them. By that point, Gonzales had exited his car and was moving toward the rear passenger door.
Serrato and the other officer then ordered Gonzales to stop but he proceeded to open the back door and reach inside where his infant son sat. The officers again shouted at Gonzales to stop but he continued reaching, promptingSerrato to shoot at Gonzales 10 times.
Gonzales was pronounced dead at the scene. In deposition testimony, Serrato said he did not know an infant was in the car.
Gutierrez’s lawyer, Albert Lopez, declined to comment.
The legal fallout and points of dispute
Gonzales’ parents initially named Serrato in their lawsuit but Pitman dismissed him in the March ruling, writing that “while regrettable” Serrato’s use of deadly force against Gonzales was reasonable based on the information available to the officer at the time. (Serrato had been told Gonzales was armed and could have reasonably believed he was reaching into the vehicle for his firearm.)
But Pitman allowed the claims brought against Gutierrez and the city to proceed to trial. Arellano, Gonzales’ girlfriend, reached a $555,000 settlement with the city and Gutierrez last month as part of the same lawsuit.
A key point of dispute, according to pretrial motions filed in the case, is whether Gonzales aimed a gun at Gutierrez prior to the off-duty officer shooting him. Gutierrez claims he shot Gonzales in self-defense, but that part of the interaction was not caught on video. The jury will have to rely on other evidence presented by both sides to reach a decision.
Other factors the jury may consider include how the city and APD responded to the shooting. In 2022, a Travis County grand jury declined to indict Gutierrez and Serrato on criminal charges. The following year, then-APD Chief Joseph Chacon declined to discipline either officer — despite contrary recommendations from the Office of Police Oversight and Community Police Review Commission, two civilian bodies tasked with overseeing APD.
All of those decisions can be presented to the jury as evidence, Pitman has ruled.
The Monell Standard
In a 2023 paper published in the Virginia Law ReviewSchwartz explained why Monell claims are so difficult to prove: Because they require plaintiffs to show that a municipality maintains written policies that are unconstitutional – or that the municipality has informal practices that are “persistent and widespread” enough to “practically have the force of law.” Plaintiffs must then show that the municipality was aware of the informal practice and “deliberately indifferent to it.”
Based on his ruling, Schwartz said Pitman seemed persuaded by the evidence plaintiffs submitted.
That evidence included an expert report submitted by the plaintiffs examining 19 high-profile use-of-force cases in which Austin officers were not disciplined; letters from the U.S. Department of Justice in 2008 and 2011 that said the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division should “conduct investigations in an objective and probing manner”; and city-commissioned audits from 2009 and 2022 that identified similar issues with how APD investigated use-of-force cases.
In his ruling, Pitman wrote that a reasonable jury could conclude that the city and APD “had the option to start disciplining officers, implement regular audits to ensure administrative investigations were adequately happening, and make the other structural changes that had been repeatedly recommended as early as 2008, but chose not to instead, allowing the problem to persist.”
Pitman also wrote that some of the deficiencies identified by the plaintiffs were present in the internal affairs investigation into Gutierrez and that the plaintiffs should be allowed to present their evidence to a jury at trial.
The trial could run as long as two weeks, according to Pitman and attorneys.
Davis, the local criminal defense attorney, said the outcome of the case will be significant regardless of what it is.
“The trial is significant, because it is an opportunity to put APD’s practices and policies around investigating shootings on trial in front of a jury,” Davis said.
In 2021, Davis represented the family of Landon Nobles in a non-Monell civil suit filed against the city after Austin police officers fatally shot Nobles in 2017. A jury awarded the family a stunning $67 million, though a judge later reduced the total to $8.3 million. After failing to agree on that figure, the plaintiffs settled with the city for $3.3 million.
Reforms could be considered
It is unclear if the jury will be allowed to consider any reforms APD has made to its investigative processes since Gonzales’ death. Attorneys asked Pitman to rule on that question before trial, but the judge reserved the right to do so mid-trial should either side present relevant evidence.
APD Chief Lisa Davis, who has held the job for less than a year, has explicitly said she wants to improve how APD investigates use of force incidents.
Following a community “listening tour” Davis conducted to gather internal and external feedback on the department, one of the issues Davis highlighted in an interview with KEYE was the amount of time it takes for internal affairs to investigate alleged misconduct.
Davis also ordered an external review of how APD tracks use-of-force incidents. The resulting reportissued last month, found a number of issues with how APD trains officers around use-of-force and how the department tracks individual incidents.
Another Monell case
A separate lawsuit that makes similar claims against the city could also go to trial, but it is unclear when.
The case was filed by the family of Javier Ambler, who was killed in 2021 by Williamson County deputies who shot him with tasers. The family already settled a case against local law enforcement but it lodged Monell claims against the city of Austin in a separate lawsuit over an Austin officer’s involvement in the incident.
Pitman was also presiding over that case and issued a similar ruling in 2023 allowing the plaintiffs’ Monell claims to go to trial, Ambler family attorney Jeff Edwards said.
Another federal judge, U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, is now presiding over the case. Albright has not yet set a trial date, according to Edwards. But he said he expects the judge to do so by mid-October.
