Former LBUSD school safety officer reaches settlement in 18-year-old's killing • Long Beach Post News

Just over four months after a jury deadlock in his murder trial, a former Long Beach Unified School District security guard today pleaded no contest to manslaughter in the shooting death of an 18-year-old woman about a block from Millikan High School.

Eddie Gonzalez, 54, is due back in a Long Beach courtroom on October 8 for sentencing. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, he faces either three or six years in prison as part of a plea agreement.

He is free on bail until the verdict is announced.

Gonzalez faced a retrial after jurors reached a deadlock in April and the judge declared a mistrial. The jury foreman told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard Goul that the jury was split 7-5 – with the majority voting to convict Gonzalez of second-degree murder. The other five opted for manslaughter and an acquittal on the more serious offense of second-degree murder for the Sept. 27, 2021, shooting death of Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was fatally shot as she sat in the passenger seat of an Infiniti driven by her boyfriend in a parking lot near the intersection of Spring Street and Palo Verde Avenue in Long Beach.

The shooting was captured on video and widely broadcast in local media.

Rodriguez died days later after life support was removed. About a month later, Gonzalez was charged with murder. Jurors were instructed that they could only consider the lesser charge of manslaughter if they acquitted Gonzalez of the premeditated murder charge.

The jury forewoman told reporters after the standoff that some of the jurors were “focused on the idea of ​​temporal lag,” which was brought up during the defense's argument to explain the time difference between when a police officer perceives a threat and when a shot is fired. But she said she was “absolutely” convinced Gonzalez was guilty of murder.

A prosecutor told jurors in April that Gonzalez was trying to “play cop” and made a series of poor decisions that led to the fatal shooting. The defendant's attorney, however, argued that his client acted in self-defense out of fear of being hit by the car the woman was in.

In his closing argument, Assistant District Attorney Lee Orquiola said Gonzalez “responded to youthful disobedience with deadly force” and “unjustifiably” fired two shots at the vehicle after an altercation between Rodriguez and an underage Millikan student.

The prosecutor told jurors that Gonzalez should have simply written down the vehicle's license plate number that day and let “real police officers handle the situation,” but instead he “allowed the situation to escalate through a series of poor decisions” and “unnecessarily fired two shots into the rear of the fleeing vehicle.”

Gonzalez swerved to avoid the vehicle and was in “no danger whatsoever” of being hit when he fired the first shot. According to the deputy district attorney's statement, he was “not acting in lawful self-defense.” He told the jury that Gonzalez was “trying to kill the driver of the vehicle.”

The prosecutor noted that a high school student who shot one of the cellphone videos testified that the school security officer was on the side of the car when he fired the first shot and on the rear of the car when he fired the second shot.

Other bystanders, including a grandmother and her two grandchildren in a nearby car in the parking lot, would have been lucky not to have been hit if the bullet had not hit Rodriguez, Orquiola said.

The prosecutor showed jurors the aftermath of the shooting, including a bullet hole in the vehicle's rear passenger window and a police firearm through the passenger seat headrest.

Defense attorney Michael Schwartz urged jurors to acquit Gonzalez, telling the panel that “true justice” requires such a verdict.

He said the prosecution must prove that his client had the intention to kill someone before he fired the shots. He told jurors that this was not a question of “leniency” or “slow motion.”

Schwartz said his client fired to “avert the threat of deadly force,” noting that two witnesses called by the defense testified they believed Gonzalez was in danger of being struck by the vehicle if he did not move out of the way.

“There was a tragedy, not a crime,” Schwartz told the jury.

During the trial, jurors were shown three videos several times, including surveillance video and cell phone videos from two passersby in which the squealing of the car's tires could be heard before the two shots were fired.

Rodriguez, the mother of a young son, was in the vehicle with her boyfriend and his teenage brother and was struck in the head by one of the bullets that entered the vehicle through the rear passenger window. Police also found an impact mark next to the rear passenger window door handle.

Gonzalez did not testify in his own defense.

A week after the shooting, he was fired from the school district.

In April 2023, Rodriguez's family announced that they had reached a $13 million settlement in their lawsuit against the school district related to her shooting death.

The lawsuit alleged that Gonzalez failed his probationary period when he applied for employment with the Los Alamitos and Sierra Madre police departments, but was hired by the LBUSD anyway, making matters worse because the LBUSD provided him with lax training.

The family's attorneys also argued that Gonzalez violated county policy by shooting into a moving vehicle at a fleeing person.

“Personally, I don't really care about the settlement. It won't bring my sister back,” Rodriguez's brother Omar said last year. “I don't want anyone else to have to go through that pain.”