Salinas police officer JD Alvarado is killed on duty; murder suspect pleads not guilty.

Jorge “JD” Alvarado was 30 years old, about to get married and, according to Salinas Police Det. Luis Toribio, he was “a genuinely great police officer and person, the kind of person everyone got along with.”

Alvarado had been with the Salinas Police Department for five years when he initiated a traffic stop around 11:40pm on Friday night, Feb. 25. He was just about a half-mile away from the Salinas Police headquarters, on East Market and Griffin streets, when he was shot and killed. He died at the scene.

About 20 minutes later, Gustavo Matias Morales checked himself into Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital for medical attention for what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the hand. Following standard protocol when treating gunshot victims, Memorial Hospital notified Salinas PD and put the hospital into lockdown, which lasted about three hours. Morales was transported to Natividad, the county’s trauma center, for further medical treatment, then booked in Monterey County Jail. 

On March 1, Morales was charged with three felonies connected to Alvarado’s killing: murder, shooting at an occupied motor vehicle and assault on a peace officer. Appearing via Zoom from the county jail, with his left arm wrapped in bandages, Morales entered a plea of not guilty. He is being held without bail.

At the time of the shooting, Morales was under a court order that prohibits him from owning firearms. 

It was not the first such order Morales, 30, has faced in recent years, with two restraining orders that include standard language: “You cannot own, or possess, have, buy, try to buy, receive or try to receive, or in any other way get guns, other firearms, or ammunition.”

Morales’ rap sheet in Monterey County began with a juvenile case in 2007, when he was 16, for tinted windows and driving without a license. In 2011, he faced an infraction for failure to stay on the right side of the road. But by 2018, things had taken a more violent turn, according to court records. 

Morales and a cousin of his were living in the same apartment building on North Hebbron Avenue in Salinas. She called police around 6pm on a Sunday night to report he was behaving in a threatening manner.“He allegedly stepped out of his vehicle and startedbanging both hands with closed fists on his own vehicle,” according to a police report. “He began hitting his head on the hood of his own vehicle and continued to yell and scream in the parking lot.” When police arrived and found him in his white Chrysler, he did not cooperate; in the scuffle that ensued, he turned an officer’s taser on the officer’s leg, and an officer punched Morales repeatedly in the head, according to police reports. The taser fell into a puddle of mud.

A misdemeanor charge of obstructing/resisting a public officer was eventually dismissed, but Morales’ cousin filed for a restraining order against him, noting he was routinely intoxicated and threatening on weekends. She’d installed surveillance cameras out of fear. “I just want to feel safe, not harassed, scared every time I step out of my house,” she wrote. 

Judge Vanessa Vallarta signed a restraining order: “The court finds there has been unlawful violence and grants the restraining order for a period of three years from today, through Jan. 3, 2022.”

In 2019, Morales was charged with a domestic violence felony, and eventually entered into a plea agreement for a misdemeanor. The charges stemmed from a fight with his ex and the mother of their two children—at the time, an 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. 

At the time, she also filed for a restraining order against him, describing a history of domestic violence. “Respondent is aggressive and violent,” she wrote. They’d been separated for five years, she wrote, when she knocked on the door of his Hebbron Avenue apartment to pick up their son from a visit. “[He] yells at me, ‘get the fuck out of my house,’” she wrote. A violent altercation followed, in which she wrote that Morales punched her and grabbed her hair; she had lost consciousness when she came to and realized that Morales’ parents and sister were holding him back from further aggression.

She also described violence from years earlier, including physical abuse while she was breastfeeding their daughter, and attempting to persuade her to get an abortion. (Reached by phone, she declined to speak about the case.)

A restraining order was signed in July 2019, in effect until July 11, 2022.

Also in 2019, Morales was charged with a DUI. By May of 2021, it looked like maybe things were taking a turn—he had a court date scheduled for his DUI case, and wrote to the judge requesting a virtual appearance, because he had a job out of state. 

“I want to do things right, that is why I’m asking for permission so that I can appear via Zoom,” he wrote. 

That request was granted, but his license was suspended for six months, through November 2021. 

Morales is being represented by the Monterey County Public Defender’s Office. Assistant Public Defender Jeremy Dzubay says he has not yet received any information from the District Attorney’s Office on the murder charges and so he declined to comment, but says he reviewed the case and body camera footage from the 2018 incident. “He was severely beaten by multiple members of the Salinas Police Department,” Dzubay says. “From what I've observed, one of the officers bragged about punching him in the head close to 50 times.”

Officials from the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office have so far declined to comment beyond what has already been stated publicly. 

"A tragedy such as this—the death of an officer while performing his duties—takes a huge toll on a police department," District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni said at a press conference on Saturday, Feb. 26.

Also speaking on Feb. 26, Salinas Police Chief Roberto Filice hinted at the exchange of gunfire: "The officer stayed in the fight all the way to the end. He gave his life for it. Thanks to his actions, we were able to apprehend the suspect."

Editor’s note: This is a longer version of a story that appears in the March 3, 2022 print edition of the Weekly.