Salinas police are captured on video beating a mentally ill man; his family speaks out.

On Friday, June 5, Rita Acosta went to play bingo with her 28-year-old son, Jose Velasco. She noticed the noise seemed to be getting to him, and he was agitated.

He left to charge his cell phone at Jack in the Box, a few doors up at the Sherwood Gardens Shopping Center on North Main Street in Salinas.

Acosta agreed to meet him there 15 minutes later. But when she arrived, Velasco wasn’t there. Acosta saw him half a block away, running into three lanes of oncoming traffic and shouting at drivers. She called 911 to request assistance, but says she hung up on the operator mid-conversation.

“I started yelling, ‘Jose, get out of the street, mi hijo!’” she recalls.

Salinas police arrived at about 7:15pm and reported what happened next in a press release: “Initially, two officers responded and saw [Velasco] slamming [his mother]’s body into the pavement of the northbound lane of North Main Street while heavy traffic was passing by.”

A passing driver took a video of the violent confrontation that followed. It was uploaded to YouTube by user Richard Boxing. Acosta is seen sitting on the median, adjusting her shirt and picking up two bags from the ground.

Meanwhile, in the middle lane, Velasco struggles with two officers. They fire a Taser twice, but he doesn’t react. One starts hitting him with a nightstick, and Velasco still tries to squirm away. A third officer runs over, and they appear to get Velasco on the ground. A fourth runs up, wearing gloves and holding a nightstick, and hits Velasco as the other three arrest him.

That’s where Acosta and one of her daughters say police went too far.

“He showed up ready to fight,” Sabina Velasco says of the officer on the video. “They did what they had to do to put him on the ground; I’m no one to say how strong he is. When three officers have him on the floor, there were still five hits straight to the head.”

Velasco sustained bruises on his arms and legs and received staples for a laceration in his head, the result of an accidental strike that missed his arm, Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin says. Even as police handcuffed him, Velasco used his free hand to bend an officer’s fingers backward, McMillin says; he claims the nightstick was aimed at that arm, not Velasco’s head.

“One benefit of a baton is it creates distance,” McMillin says. “Even if Velasco is down, it doesn’t mean he is under control, or that he’s no longer dangerous or fighting.”

Velasco told police he’d been using methamphetamine and alcohol, McMillin says. He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, assault on an officer and resisting arrest. As of the Weekly’s deadline, the case had not been forwarded to the District Attorney. Velasco was to be arraigned June 10 for a parole violation.

Joe Livernois is chair of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which advocates for educating law enforcement officers on how to recognize and address signs of mental illness.

But in a case like this, when officers respond to a scene that looks like a man attacking a woman in the street, Livernois says their approach was appropriate based on what he can see in the video.

"If they encounter a victim being harmed, then all bets are off," he says. "The thing that concerns me is they had a victim and they were just pounding him even after he was on the ground. That’s an issue, but it’s not a mental health issue."

Acosta says Velasco was diagnosed with severe depression in jail, but he has never been treated for mental illness out of custody.

Three days later, standing across the street from where it happened, Acosta speaks through tears. As officers struggled with her son, Acosta says, she yelled to them that he was mentally ill.

“They make it sound like my son was trying to kill me,” she says. “He was trying to get me away from whatever was haunting him that day.”