Last Thursday the Claremont Police Commission held their first meeting since the homicide of Diego Rios. Claremont community members — including many 5C students — spoke out during public comment seeking accountability and reform from the city.
The Commission did not respond to demands or suggestions from speakers throughout the meeting.
Diego Rios’ death has been ruled a homicide by the LA County Medical Examiner’s office, according to their report released on Thursday, Feb. 12. The ruling comes months after Rios died in police custody after being stopped by Corporal Benjamin Alba and Joshua Orona on Nov. 28. Since Rios’s death, 5C students have rallied with the Rios family to ask for transparency and the release of missing body camera footage. Diego’s official cause of death was ruled as cardiopulmonary arrest, attributed in the report to the “effects of cocaine and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in the setting of prone physical restraint.” According to the medical report obtained by the Claremont Courier, “[t]he manner of death is homicide due to volitional human involvement regardless of the intent of any individuals’ actions.”
Diego Rios died on Nov. 28 after Claremont Police officer Benjamin Alba put his knee on Rios’s neck, holding him in an illegal carotid chokehold for almost two minutes. “The violence demonstrated by Claremont Police and the resulting failure of the city to bring this incident to justice with transparency should be a wake-up call for everyone who calls this city home. State-sanctioned violence is not confined to the streets of Minneapolis; it’s happening in our backyard,” Macy Puckett SC ’28 wrote.
