Johnson has also filed a federal lawsuit against the city of La Mesa and Dages, alleging negligence, excessive force and violence due to his race. ![]() Visco said, now that the trial is over, Dages will continue his fight for his policing job. Coffee’s defense claimed the defendant was asleep and thought a flash-bang set off by deputies was gunfire. The ex-police officer was fired from the department following the allegations, to which Dages responded by filing an appeal request to get his job back. Coffee was found not guilty of the murder of his girlfriend Alteria Woods and the attempted murder of Florida Indian River County sheriff deputies during an early morning drug raid in 2017. "La Mesa is moving forward, but I think La Mesa needs to know that the eyes are watching them and they think some of the things La Mesa is doing is just for show."ĭages was charged for lying on a police report in January. "We expected nothing less than getting a jury that would find him innocent," Williamson said. Johnson was never charged with smoking on the platform - which he was initially stopped for - and all other charges for Johnson were eventually dropped.Ĭommunity activist Tasha Williamson said La Mesa is ready to move on from the incident. Johnson’s demeanor and lying to me off the bat was pretty big red flags."įormer La Mesa Police Department Officer Matt Dages faces a charge of falsifying a police report in the arrest of Amaurie Johnson, reports NBC 7's Rory Devine. I don’t see many stand there at the garage entrance, and the observation I made was I believed he was smoking," Dages testified. He also said it was a mistake not to turn on his body-camera but affirmed that he did believe Johnson was smoking on the trolley platform. In his testimony, Dages said he left things out of the report that he did not feel needed to be in there, like that Johnson called his friends to confirm he was waiting for them at the trolley stop. Prosecutors said Dages accused Johnson of smoking on the platform then later lied about the controversial arrest in his police report. The only crime that Amaurie had in the minds of some law enforcement officers is being Black in public and we believe this is an example of this.” ![]() "People of color have a high rate of contact even if they haven’t done anything, so we see this, this unnecessary contact as a pretext to find some crime that a Black person is doing. ![]() After the verdict was delivered to the courtroom in La Mesa, NBC 7's Priya Sridhar spoke to residents of the community about their reaction to the case.
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