Councilors, residents and parents of man fatally shot by police call out APD

Emotions were high at the Albuquerque City Council chambers Monday night when the parents of the man Albuquerque police officers fatally shot last week pleaded for justice and change. 

Fred and Bernadette Garcia, parents of Matthew “Solo” Garcia, told the council that police “didn’t have to kill him.” 

“He was a great father, a great son, a great husband, my best friend as well…he was my second child that I lost in a lifetime,” Fred Garcia said. “And that really kills me inside, but Solo being the one that should have justice right now. Please do something for my son, I ask you this.” 

Police said in a news release last week that officers were conducting a code enforcement operation at the Tewa Lodge motel on Central Avenue NE on Oct. 18 when they shot and killed Garcia who was handcuffed in the backseat of a police car. 

Albuquerque Police Department (APD) Chief Harold Medina released some of the lapel footage of the shooting and said at a press conference Sunday that officers needed to be interviewed before more footage was released. The video shows officers trying to take away a gun that Garcia admitted having behind his back before shots are fired. 

Medina attended Monday’s meeting and answered questions from some councilors, but left before Garcia’s parents told the council that APD did not contact them about the incident and asked why the officers failed to search their son before placing him in handcuffs. 

“Him being in the back of that vehicle and not being searched before he was put in that vehicle was uncalled for,” Fred Garcia said. 

Councilor Nichole Rogers, whose district includes the Tewa Lodge, was the first to question Medina about the shooting and asked why certain protocols were missed. 

“Yes, we are mandated to search individuals, there is an investigation into the search of this individual prior to being put into the car,” Medina said. “I don’t want to get into the details because this still is an active administrative investigation…The last thing we want to do is compromise these investigations with releasing too much information.” 

Councilor Louie Sanchez, a frequent critic of Medina and APD, questioned whether Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Sengel checks the “quality of officers that we are hiring” and the training at APD since “ultimately you are the chief’s boss.” 

Sengel said she trusts the department’s leadership to be “responsible for that work.”

Sanchez, who is also a former police officer, continued to press Sengel. 

“I have never seen a police officer have to shoot someone in the back seat in a vehicle that has been handcuffed before,” Sanchez said. “It’s something that I’ve never seen in the 29 years that I’ve been involved in city government. I would hope that you, being the CAO of the City of Albuquerque, would take some steps to make sure that a lot of these things that I just talked about are dealt with.” 

Caitlin Bourg, one of the many outraged residents who attended Monday’s meeting, asked what consequences there are for officers who  “repeatedly shot a handcuffed man.” 

“Solo’s death is not an isolated tragedy,” Bourg said. “It fits into a larger, well-documented pattern of violence, negligence and corruption by APD.”