Politics
5 Years After Killing Driver, Officer Fights at Trial to Keep His Job
In an internal trial, Lt. Jonathan Rivera of the New York Police Department faces charges that he acted rashly when he shot Allan Feliz during an altercation.
The deadly stop began over an unfastened seatbelt.
Jonathan Rivera, then a sergeant with the New York Police Department, was patrolling near Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx on Oct. 17, 2019, when his partner saw that the driver of a Volkswagen Atlas did not appear to have a seatbelt on.
Sergeant Rivera and his partner pulled over the driver, Allan Feliz, ran his driver’s license and found several open warrants for failing to pay fines for spitting and littering. When theofficers moved to pat him down, Mr. Feliz, 31, tried to drive away. As Sergeant Rivera’s partner struggled to pull Mr. Feliz out of the car, Sergeant Rivera tried to subdue him with a Taser.
Then, he shot Mr. Feliz once in the chest, killing him.
On Tuesday, Lieutenant Rivera, who was later promoted, testified during a departmental trial at Police Headquarters in Manhattan that will determine whether he should keep his job. He said he believed that he had to shoot Mr. Feliz to save his partner’s life.
“I feared the worst,” said Lieutenant Rivera. “I feared I had no other option.”
Prosecutors for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, New York City’s independent police oversight agency, have accused him of assault in the first degree and menacing in the second degree. Lieutenant Rivera has not been criminally charged, but the prosecutors said his actions should lead to his termination.
On that day, at 2:53 p.m., Lieutenant Rivera failed to follow his training or make sound tactical decisions, said Amanda Rodriguez, one of the board’s two prosecutors.
“Instead,” she said during her opening statement, “panic took the lead.”
The police are rarely challenged for shooting people in the line of duty. High-profile cases of brutality, including the death of George Floyd, brought a wave of promises from prosecutors who said they would move aggressively against officers who used deadly force. But charges have remained elusive, often because facts are ambiguous or cases lack stark evidence such as the citizen video of Minneapolis police officers killing Mr. Floyd.
