Andrea Churna thought someone was trying to kill her when she called Redmond police for help the night of Sept. 20, 2020. Raised around cops, she did what she was asked to do when police arrived to find her armed with a handgun.
She put the weapon down, walked out of her apartment unarmed, clad in a T-shirt and yoga pants, hands up, and laid face down on the carpeted hallway floor outside her door proned out as officers at the scene described it.
None of that kept police from killing her. An officer, just 18 months out of the police academy, shot the 39-year-old mother six times with a high-powered rifle as she lay on the floor 30 feet away. She had been in obvious distress and was asking for her ex-husband.
She called them for help, said an emotional Michael Thomas, Churnas father, as he sat at the dining room table in his home in Port Orchard. And they killed her for it. This is a nightmare for us. Where is the justice for my daughter?
More than a year later, Thomas is dismissive of the process surrounding the investigation into his daughters death. Hes frustrated that nobody can tell him whether the officers involved will be held accountable for what he believes was an unnecessary and excessive use of force against an unarmed, mentally disturbed woman who had asked for help and was trying to surrender.
While any father would feel that way in his position, Thomas opinion carries a certain authority hes a retired Michigan State Police commander who in a distinguished 32-year career investigated or oversaw investigations into dozens of police shootings and homicides himself.
Ive never seen anything like it, said Thomas. Where are the charges? The facts are there. Andrea grew up in a law enforcement family. I feel guilty because her expectation was that if you called police, they would come and help.
The shooting was investigated by the King County Sheriffs Office, whose detectives repeatedly expressed frustration over the lack of cooperation of the Redmond officers and interference by their union attorney,according to sheriffs reports. They turned an admittedly incomplete investigation over to the King County Prosecuting Attorneys Office last spring. Prosecutors have declined to decide whether to pursue criminal charges against the officers pending a coroners inquest a process stalled since 2017 and currently mired in procedural knots.
Fifteen months after the shooting, the officer who killed Churna, 26-year-old Daniel Mendoza, has declined to give a statement to sheriffs investigators or be interviewed about why he pulled the trigger. Several other officers at the scene the only witnesses since there were no civilians in the hallway, no surveillance cameras and none of the officers wore body cameras were sent home that night without talking to investigators.
Police officers enjoy the same Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination as all citizens. They were not admonished against talking to one another and most didnt provide written statements for six days, after they had all consulted with the same guild attorney. Some written statements didnt come in for months. Several officers there that night declined to sit for follow-up interviews or provide any additional information to outside investigators.
The statements that have been provided to us up to this point are not adequate or conducive for us to conduct a thorough investigation, wrote King County sheriffs Detective Sarah Gerlitz in an email to her supervisors Nov. 14, 2020, more than six weeks after the shooting.
In most criminal investigations, potential suspects are generally separated as the sheriffs detectives attempted here or otherwise asked not to speak with one another to avoid collusion or dilution of recollection. In addition, the routine practice of delaying questioning of officers involved in using force also is controversial; additional time is rarely afforded citizens suspected of violent crimes.
All of those statements are suspect, said Kim Zak, an attorney hired by Churnas parents, who are planning a lawsuit.
A review of several hundred pages of investigative reports, diagrams, crime-scene photographs and dispatch calls and logs obtained by The Seattle Times through a public disclosure request showed most of those officers continue their silence today.
This past September, after the sheriffs criminal investigation was completed, Redmond Chief Darrell Lowe announced he was launching an internal investigation into the shooting, stating that he had employed the Force Science Institute out of Illinois to provide an independent force review and analysis of the shooting.
However, FSI has been denounced by civil rights attorneys, psychologists and the Department of Justice for its methods and conclusions. A 2015 New York Times investigation pointed out that foundation consultants, in hundreds of cases involving police shootings, almost universally sided with the officer, even when the suspect was unarmed.
The results of the internal investigation are pending.
Chief Lowe, in a statement last week, stated that the Churna shooting will also be the subject of a coroners inquest. However, it rests at No. 43 in a list of 52 pending inquests into law enforcement-related deaths in King County since 2017, and it could be years before an inquest jury hears the case and the prosecutors office gets its recommendation. ...continued