California police officer charged for fatal shooting of an unarmed Filipino American

SCREEN CAPTURE / YOUTUBE

Laudemer Arboleda was killed by a police officer in 2018.

The wheels of justice grind. Ever. So. Slowly. 

As a jury convicts former police officer Derek Chauvin Tuesday, a year after he murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck over nine minutes, the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office announced charges against a Sheriff's deputy for fatally shooting an unarmed Filipino American after a two and one-half years investigation.

Former deputy Andrew Hall is being charged with killing Laudemer Arboleda, 33. Hall fired his gun multiple times as Arboleda drove slowly pass the deputy. Arboleda was not threatening anybody but appeared confused as he knocked on doors in a Danville, California neighborhood.

Hall is also under investigation for the fatal shooting of Tyrell Wilson on March 11. Partially obstructed video shot by a bystander showed Wilson taking a step back, a knife in hand, before Hall fired.

Hall is currently on administrative leave for another incident last month for shooting Tyrell Wilson, a 32-year old homeless Black man. 

In Arboledo's case, it appears to be a classic case of being a man of color being in a predominantly white neighborhood.

The county's District Attorney, Diana Becton, defended the more than two-year investigation at a news conference Wednesday, April 21.

“It took time due to the backlog of prior law enforcement-involved fatal incidents my office is investigating," said Becton. "I am doing everything that I can to end this backlog and to ensure our independent investigations conclude in an expeditious manner.”

Becton said Hall had used “unreasonable and unnecessary force” in responding to the slow auto pursuit involving Arboleda.

It took 13 months before the police video footage was released. From the dash and body cam video released it is clear that officer Hall was not in harms way and if anything put himself in the path of the car. Video evidence can be viewed in the following link. This video evidence was released 13 months after Laudemer's death.

A resident called Danville police after Arboleda rang the resident's doorbell asking for directions. Instead of going back to his car, the resident told the dispatcher that  Arboleda was acting "suspicious," and continued to carry two bags as he lingered in the neighborhood.

Danville has a contract with the county's Sheriff's Office which provides officers for local law enforcement.

When police arrived, they found Arboleda in his car. Instead of obeying the officers, he drove away. Officers then followed Arboleda, who at that point had not committed any crime. His family's lawyer, John Burris, attests that Arboleda was afraid of police. The pursuit was not a high-speed chase as Arboleda drove off. He even stopped a couple of time when police though he was going to surrender. 

Officer Hall had parked his vehicle to block Arboleda from driving any further.

“Mr. Arboleda was trying to squeeze by between cars," said Burris who represents Arboleda’s family in a civil suit. "He wasn’t trying to hit anyone, and this officer who could have put himself in the position of safety decided to shoot into the car 9 times an unarmed man.” 

Family members say Arboleda suffers from a mental illness. He had driven to Danville, about a 20 minute drive from his home in Newark, in neighboring Alameda County. Danville is a suburban town of 44,000 east of San Francisco and Oakland. It is about 80% white. Asians make up about 14% of the city

“Officer Hall’s actions underscore the need for a continued focus on de-escalation training and improved coordinated responses to individuals suffering from mental illness,” Becton said at the press conference.

Charges include felony voluntary manslaughter and felony assault with a semi-automatic firearm and unreasonable force used during the shooting of Laudemer Arboleda in 2018.

Jeannie Atienza, Arboleda's mother alleges her son's “only crime was being the wrong skin color in Danville.”

Four family members killed in a murder-suicide

Asian Americans avoid talking about mental illness because of the social stigma attached to it.

Seething with anger, frustration and jealousy may have pushed a man over the edge to kill four family members before taking his own life Monday, according to relatives.

San Jose, Calif. police believe that Sunday (June 23) night, Chi Dinh Ta, 60, fatally shot four relatives with a stolen 9mm handgun. His wife and a daughter climbed over a back fence to escape the carnage.

After police responded to the shooting and began searching the area, early Monday morning they found Ta nearby, fatally wounded from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.

Authorities would not name the victims — three women and one man who had recently arrived from Vietnam — have not been released by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office until family members could identify them.

Ta was barred from owning or possessing firearms or ammunition because of three 1988 felony convictions in Orange County for second-degree robbery, attempted second-degree robbery and criminal conspiracy. He served two years of a five-year prison sentence, earning credit for time served and good behavior, and was granted parole in 1990, according to records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“He called me and he said, ‘Would you take my daughter?’ ” the cousin, To V Khuat, said in an interview with the Mercury News. “He said he was going to kill them. He had said things like this before, but I had always talked him down, calmed him down.”

Khuat, whose wife is Ta’s cousin, said in an interview that the gunman had often spoken to him about his troubles with his family.

“He was jealous that his wife was able to sponsor her family and he was not able to bring his family here because of things in his record,” Khuat said. “That is the cause.”

Police would not confirm or comment on Khuat's theory as they continued their investigation.

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HEALTH: Chrissy Teigen opens up about her postpartum blues

THERE'S A LOT of women who would love to exchange places with Chrissy Teigen. 

With handsome husband John Legend who earns a good living by writing and singing musical hits, photo assignments in some of the most beautiful locales around the world, wearing the designer clothes and blessed with the physical attributes of a swimsuit model, it would seem that she has everything a woman could want.

Teigen graces the cover of Marie Claire magazine's July edition. Normally, having an AAPI person on the cover of a major magazine, it would be an occasion to write about the progress we have made integrating into the U.S.

But in this case, Teigen is on the cover for another reason - a dark secret that she reveals in the article. Like many new mothers after giving birth, she suffers from postpartum anxiety and depression. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 11 to 20% of women who give birth each year have postpartum depression symptoms.

Teigen explains how the condition often makes her feel unsteady and worried.“Every step I take feels a little shaky,” she said. “It’s such a weird feeling that you wouldn’t know unless you have really bad anxiety ... You feel like everyone is looking at you.”

Also known as perinatal anxiety, PPA can cause sufferers to feel constantly anxious—to the point where it can interfere with their daily lives. Postpartum anxiety can go hand-in-hand with postpartum depression or it can be completely separate. say medical doctors. Doctors aren't totally sure what causes PPA, but suspect that the lack of sleep and fluctuating hormone levels that come with being a new mom may be at play, she says.

When Teigen was diagnosed with anxiety, she was also diagnosed with PPD, a mood disorder impacting one in every seven to nine mothers, although estimates vary, according to the American Psychological Association. 

PPD involves the onset of moderate to severe depressive symptoms—including insomnia, loss of appetite, increased irritability, and difficulty bonding with the baby—lasting more than two weeks. he model first revealed her illness in the March issue of Glamour magaizine.

Teigen now takes an antidepressant to treat her conditions. And though she's talked about still having "bad days" with her PPD, she's trying not to let the condition interfere with her desire to expand her family. "I loved being pregnant," she said. "Maybe I should be scared [of having PPD again], but I don't know. It couldn't be any worse than it was, could it?"

Teigen also discusses living with postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Luna in April 2016. She said that she treats the mood disorders with medication.

Considering the reluctance among AAPI to discuss and treat mental illness because of the stigma associated with it. The articles about Teigen's condition puts a spotlight on the illness. She hopes that by going public about her condition, it will encourage other women to understand that their illness is not their fault and that it is treatable.

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Isla Vista: Making of a wannabe white guy

Elliot Rodger

IF ELLIOT RODGER hated anybody, it was himself.

I've avoided commenting on the shootings at Isla Vista where Elliott Rodgers went on a rampage because a lot of people with more expertise on the topic wrote tons of material trying answer the question of "Why?"

Why would someone who -- on the outside-looking-in -- had "everything?" Why kill six people, wound a dozen others then kill himself? He came from an upper-income family, drove an expensive BMW, was going to a good university which would normally give him a good foundation for success. If he wanted to, he already had his foot in the door if he wanted to enter the entertainment industry because his father was in the motion picture industry, which allowed the young Rogers to occasionally rub shoulders with the rich and famous.

Immediately after the carnage, pundits wrote about white male entitlement, mysogyny (hatred of women), mental illness, when, truthfully, all of them were part of the reason that led a young man to go on a shooting spree, stab his roommates and run down several others with his car.

To this list, I'd like to add one more: Rodgers was a white-guy wannabe.

Very few writers mentioned that Rodgers was biracial, with an Asian mother and a white father. In his hate-filled screeds found in his computer and a delusional manifesto, he often referred to himself as "Eurasian" and considered himself a cut above those who considered themselves as 100% people of color.

At the same time, he saw himself "less" than his full-blooded white counterparts.

I certainly don't want to give excuses for his inexplicable and despicable behavior, but in a way, it can be argued that he was a victim of our own Euro-centric society where our ideas of beauty, power and reward derive from the standards set by our culture and perpetuated and reinforced by our media.

Only in brief spurts did anybody question the idea of what and who is beautiful -- i.e. most notably the groundbreaking Black is Beautiful movement spurred by the militant 1960s, and more recently by Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o, who used her moment of fame during the Academy Awards to speak about her own doubts of acceptance because she didn't meet the traditional (nee caucasion-based) standards of beauty.

Rodgers especially wanted the attention of blonde women, who -- in his twisted mind -- were the ultimate gauge of his masculinity.

At this point, we need to remind ourselves of the desexualized, unassertive, wimp Asian male stereotype in American pop-culture. Although Rodgers didn't say it outright, he thought his Asian roommates were "ugly" and he had no problem stabbing them to death while they slept, thus acting out his unspoken hatred of himself, or at least that half of himself that he never could accept.

He thought that since he was half-white, he should be deserving of all the trophies of being a white male, which included sex with white women and easy access to money (he spent a fortune on lotto tickets thinking a big bankroll would give him access to acceptance by the white power structure).

Instead, his inability to reach his goals in status, sex and fortune led to his frustration and ultimately to his instability: He was a virgin, he was middle-class but not uber-wealthy and he was half-white. He seemed to ignore his Asian half but he thought he was white enough, which he believed should have given him access to the white-guys' club with all the benefits bestowed on that membership.

Like many angry white males in our society (and he considered himself more white than Asian) Rodgers thought he was entitled to certain  rewards simply by his privileged standing in our society. In his twisted logic, anyone who is not white, but were obtaining those prizes that were rightly supposed to be "given" to him, only compounded his anger and drove him over the edge.

The rewards of being white have been drilled into us from the moment we are born, the books and magazines we read, the movies and TV commercials we watch, the history we are taught and the heroes we worship. It is not a simple thing to change that world-view, consciously or subconsciously, imposed on all of us -- no matter what color we are.

Only by reexamining our values, definitions of beauty and by making a conscious effort to change what we are told to believe will we, as people of color, be able to gain a sense and respect of one's self. Fortunately, that's not a new lesson. It is a well-traveled road many have had to explore in order to maintain a sense of sanity and self-worth.

The amount of melanin in our skin doesn't determine the degree of perfection,  neither do almond-shaped eyes need to be surgically rounded, black hair doesn't need "highlighting;" rounded noses don't need to be pointed and ... stop being so conscious of height.

Rodgers is literally and figuratively, a person who was not comfortable in his own skin. But he is also an example of someone who allowed himself to lose himself in our culture's unrealistic standards of perfection, especially those highly imperfect benchmarks based on race or ethnicity.

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For more insight, link to:
-In his own words, "My Twisted World" http://abclocal.go.com/three/kabc/kabc/My-Twisted-World.pdf
-Elliot Rodger's Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/user/ElliotRodger

EDITOR'S NOTE:  For more commentary, observations, tips and references, follow me on Twitter @dioknoed