INDIO, Calif. (AP) — A former Los Angeles police officer who shot and killed a mentally ill man who attacked him in a Costco store won’t be retried for voluntary manslaughter, prosecutors said.
Salvador Sanchez won’t face a second trial for killing 32-year-old Kenneth French and wounding his parents in 2019 during a confrontation at a store in Corona, southeast of Los Angeles, the state attorney general’s office said last week.
Last month a mistrial was declared after jurors in Riverside County deadlocked, with a majority in favor of acquittal.
State prosecutors decided against a retrial “after considering a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, the input of the surviving victims and feedback from the trial jury,” the California Department of Justice said in a statement last Friday.
Sanchez and his family “feel humbled and grateful to God for the outcome,” his lawyer, Michael Schwartz, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise after the decision.
“The stress on the Sanchez family, emotionally as well as financially, has been enormous,” Schwartz said.
Sanchez was off duty and holding his young son in his arms when French knocked him to the ground from behind at the Costco in June 2019. The officer fired seconds later, fatally wounding French and critically injuring the man’s parents, Russell and Paola French.
French was nonverbal and had recently been taken off unspecified medication due to other health issues, the family’s lawyer had said, adding that the change may have affected his behavior that night. French’s family believes he suffered from schizophrenia.
While Sanchez told investigators he believed French had a gun and that his life was in danger, authorities said French was not armed and was moving away from Sanchez when the officer began shooting.
The state attorney general filed charges of voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a firearm against Sanchez in 2021 after a Riverside County grand jury did not bring an indictment.
Sanchez was a seven-year veteran of the LAPD at the time of the shooting. He was fired in 2020 after the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners ruled that his actions violated departmental policy.
A federal jury awarded $17 million to French’s parents in 2021 in a wrongful death lawsuit.
