Indigenous leaders call for a review of Salinas Police tactics.

Julissa Reyes sits on the edge of a planter box outside of the Salinas Police Department headquarters, and she’s preparing to pray. She’s trying to light incense, but the afternoon wind sweeps through and whips out the flame. A few feet from her, another woman stands in front of a drum, teaching a drummer the beat she, Reyes and a third woman will need when their prayer begins.

Their prayer comes from dance—“prayer in motion,” Reyes says—and today she and her fellow members of the Aztec dance group Oceloyotl are praying for the spirit of 19-year-old Gerardo Martinez.

They are also praying for Martinez’s family to find justice. As about three dozen people march from nearby La Paz Park to the police building to hold a vigil organized by the social justice collaborative MILPA, the drumming starts and Oceloyotl begins its sacred dance.

“It’s important for me to be here because I want to support this family and recognize the injustice done to them,” Reyes says. “They’re trying to go along and go unnoticed and they’re not trying to make waves. And the police need to be trained in de-escalating in a safe way.”

On July 16, some of the men and women who work in the building outside of which Oceloyotl danced responded to a 911 call reporting a man pointing a gun at a neighbor. The neighbor, according to a press release from the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office, said it might have been a BB gun, but added “but who knows.”

“He pointed it at us and he’s really drunk right now,” the caller said. “I need an officer over here ASAP.”

The first officers arrived outside the home Martinez shared with his family on the 100 block of Smith Street at 8:07pm. At 8:37pm, Martinez opened the door and stepped outside several times; the last time, he held a gun pointed in the direction of people; Officer Mario Reyes fired his rifle three times and shot Martinez at least once in the chest. Video taken by police drone and released by the DA’s office showed his death.

The weapon Martinez held, it turned out, was a BB gun.

There’s no audio on this video, and while the Weekly has requested the body-worn camera footage from the officers there that night, it’s being withheld during the investigation, which is being conducted by the DA’s office. While last September Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1506 into law, which tasks the state Department of Justice with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians, the DoJ declined to take up Martinez’s killing because Martinez was considered armed. Indigenous leaders from across the state are calling on the DoJ to step in though, and asking for an independent review of the SPD’s de-escalation training.

There are questions of whether Martinez, a speaker of the Indigenous language Zapotec, understood commands being issued in Spanish, and questions of whether police knew he may have had limited or no understanding of Spanish.

For some, though, those questions don’t matter. Several people told me there’s no language in which you point even a replica weapon at police and should expect to live.

But we can live with these conflicting thoughts, can’t we? We can live with the thoughts that Reyes and his fellow officers had the right to go home at the end of their shift, and the thought that maybe something more could have been done to de-escalate the situation.

Joe Grebmeier, who spent 22 years as a Monterey County Sheriff’s deputy and retired as police chief of Greenfield in 2012, spent much of his time in that second job trying to build bridges with the city’s Indigenous population by becoming culturally aware.

“Salinas police are really patient about this stuff, but if he came out with a gun, that forces the issue,” Grebmeier says. “Was it suicide by cop? Was it, ‘I’m so drunk I don’t know what I’m doing?’ But getting to the language issue, we all assume if you look Mexican, you speak Spanish. There are 23 sublanguages. Zapotec doesn’t sound like Triqui and Triqui doesn’t sound like Mixteco Baja.”

But the gun, Grebmeier reiterates, “changes things real quick.

“You don’t have a lot of time,” he says. “It’s not a case of ‘let’s see if he shoots first,’ not if you want to go home alive.”

Mary Duan writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan.