Good morning and welcome to the TimesOC newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Feb. 24. I’m Carol Cormaci, an editor new to this rotation with my colleagues, editor John Canalis and reporter Ben Brazil, to bring you the latest roundup of Orange County happenings.
It’s great news that, as of Saturday, Orange County hospitals had reported seeing a 45% reduction of COVID-19 patients arriving at their doorsteps over the previous two weeks. But the fits and starts of getting the vaccines to as many in the U.S. as possible, a promise most recently hindered by transportation issues caused by last week’s extreme weather conditions across the country’s heart, have been dispiriting to many.
Print
An appellate court last week ruled in favor of Tiffany Tabares, the mother of a 27-year-old who was shot and killed by a Huntington Beach Police Department officer outside of a local 7-Eleven in 2017.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Feb. 17 that a jury could find Officer Eric Esparza acted unreasonably when he shot Dillan Tabares seven times on Sept. 22, 2017, across the street from Marina High School.
Additionally, the judges ruled that a reasonable jury could conclude that Esparza should have suspected that Tabares had mental health issues, and that he unreasonably failed to follow police protocol on dealing with potentially mentally ill people before using force.