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On opposite ends of California, two women who have never met are united by grief and purpose.
This month, Kathleen Bils laid a memorial stone in a flower bed on the San Diego street where a sheriff’s deputy shot her son one year earlier. Some 500 miles north, at a marina on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay, Addie Kitchen recently held a memorial in the city where a police officer killed her grandson.
“I want people to understand that our children are important to us and that we want justice,” said Kitchen, a retired prison guard. “We want the officers to be held accountable.”
and the shooting.
While what prompted Russell to open fire remains unclear, his attorney, Richard Pinckard, asked one witness, San Diego Police Department Sgt.
Andrew Tafoya, whether the video footage shows Bils running toward an occupied car as he fled.
Tafoya testified that he thought Bils was running next to the vehicle, rather than toward it.
Though Bils wasn t carrying any weapons, Pinckard noted he had only managed to slip the cuffs off of one of his wrists. He asked Tafoya whether Bils may have been holding onto the dangling cuff in his hand as he ran from
the scene, but Tafoya answered that he couldn t come to a conclusion one way or another.
SAN DIEGO
The mother of a mentally ill man who was fatally shot after he slipped out of custody and ran from sheriff’s deputies outside the downtown San Diego jail filed a federal lawsuit Monday, alleging excessive force and wrongful death.
Nicholas Bils, 36, was shot after he leapt from a park ranger’s car and sprinted up a sidewalk in the early evening of May 1.
His mother, Kathleen Bils, is suing several people and entities, including the County of San Diego, Sheriff Bill Gore and Aaron Russell, the deputy accused of firing the fatal shot.
Nicholas Bils, 36
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Russell, 24, has been charged in San Diego Superior Court with second-degree murder. His is the first case brought since the state law changed in January to raise the standard for when officers can use deadly force. It is permissible only when “necessary,” when a life is in imminent danger and nonlethal methods are not available, the law states. Previously, deadly force had been allowable when