Her daughter killed herself with a police officer’s gun. Still looking for answers | National News

LOS ANGELES – When Alex Gutierrez got home from work early on a Sunday afternoon in March, he called for his youngest daughter and smiled when she came out of her room to greet him.

Normally she was bubbly and bubbly, but this time she really let it rip by hugging and kissing the box of Propel fitness water he had brought from the store. That it was her favorite seemed only fitting for a girl who is always on the move.

The 67-year-old La Puente man laughed at his teenager’s achievement and then went inside to take a nap.

In the past, 17-year-old Johanna Gonzalez has struggled with mental health issues, hearing voices and having uncontrollable seizures and outbursts. But today seemed to be a good day.

Then, around 7 p.m., Gutierrez woke up to angry voices. Johanna screamed at her mother and then flew out of the house. The winter sky was already dark, but the teenager rushed to the nearest sheriff’s station, about a mile away.

She knocked on the door until a deputy approached her, extending his right arm across his body toward the handle – leaving the gun open on his right hip as he answered.

Without hesitation, Johanna pulled the gun out of the holster and started a fight. A leaked video of the incident, reviewed by The Times, showed the deputy striking the girl twice, apparently in an ill-fated attempt to disarm her.

Less than 20 seconds later, Johanna shot herself in the head. She died on the floor of the Industry Sheriff’s Station.

“It’s just unbelievable,” Gutierrez told the Times in an interview. “How can a 17-year-old girl disarm a sheriff’s deputy so easily?”

More than a month later, that remains one of the many unresolved questions about what happened that night at the sheriff’s station. Johanna’s parents have questions about the deputy’s training. The family’s lawyer wants to know the name of the deputy. And several people within the department have asked questions about why his gun wasn’t better secured and what type of holster he was using.

Department officials said little publicly, but sent an email reminder to all officers a few weeks after the girl’s death instructing them not to use unapproved holsters or weapons. Although officials did not answer a number of questions for this story — including the deputy’s name or whether he was wearing an approved holster — the department said in a statement to the Times that “multiple levels of review” were underway, including also an internal administrative investigation.

“Our involved employees were extremely distraught and the department offered them our mental health services,” the statement said. “Our thoughts are with the family during this difficult time.”

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Johanna had a hard life almost from the start. She was born in North Carolina in 2006, the youngest of three children in a family that moved frequently. Before she was big enough to walk, her mother was deported to El Salvador and her elderly father seemed on the verge of losing custody. So the children’s aunt and uncle – Miriam and Alex Gutierrez – took in all three children.

The couple already had a son of their own, living in their ranch-style home in a working-class neighborhood of La Puente, with a papaya tree in the front and a rubber tree in the back. Miriam worked as a seamstress and Alex was a truck driver. And a few years after taking in the Gonzalez children, Alex and Miriam took in two more children from another family member.

“We always wanted a big family,” said Miriam.

They had it for a while.

The Gutierrezes were the only parents Johanna had really known – and she called them Mom and Dad. From a young age, she was adventurous and always on the move – working in the garden, doing household chores and begging her parents to let her accompany her on simple errands. She enjoyed skateboarding and running and dreamed of becoming a paramedic.

But when Johanna reached her teenage years, she started having problems. She still did well at school, achieving mostly grades one and two. And she was still her usual ebullient self at home. At night, however, she started slipping out the window to meet an older man.

It’s not clear what Johanna thought of the relationship, but Alex is now outspoken about it: “He sexually abused her and made her take drugs.”

But he and Miriam didn’t find out about it for years.

Meanwhile, Johanna started having mood swings and what Miriam referred to as “episodes.” Sometimes she would tell her family that she was hearing voices – and occasionally they would catch her in her room talking to them. Finally, a doctor told Alex and Miriam that their daughter may have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but that she was still so young that it was difficult to make a firm diagnosis.

Some of Johanna’s strange behaviors began to make a little more sense about two years ago, after she confessed to a cousin that she had been leaving in the night. The day Alex found out, he installed cameras everywhere in the house so that Johanna – then 15 – couldn’t go out at night.

But that didn’t solve the problems. According to Alex and Miriam, Johanna reacted violently and made allegations of sexual abuse against a man who the Gutierrezes had allowed to live in the cave. Child welfare workers soon removed Johanna and her siblings. According to Miriam and Alex, the other children were allowed to return almost immediately. But Johanna moved to a locked facility where she could receive treatment.

She was taking medication and seemed more stable. The man who abused her was eventually arrested and sentenced to probation, her parents said. And while Johanna lived outside the house, Miriam visited her at every opportunity. At the beginning of the year, Johanna was feeling so well that she came home for a longer visit.

But on the afternoon of March 24, Johanna and her mother got into an argument about when she could replace her broken phone. She screamed that she wanted to leave, that she wanted to hit a police officer and go to jail.

Hoping to calm her down, Miriam called Johanna’s brother Daniel, 19, and put the call on speakerphone. Johanna told him she would rather die than return to the facility.

Shortly before 7:30 p.m., she ran out the front door, her father said. He called 911 and asked for help searching. He said he warned the dispatcher that Johanna had suffered from mental health issues in the past and that this appeared to be an episode.

Meanwhile, her mother jumped into the car to follow her, slowly driving behind her a bit so as not to get too close and upset her further. It was a relief as she watched Johanna walk to the sheriff’s station and start knocking on the door.

Miriam parked outside and waited, thinking she would give her daughter a few minutes to calm down before following her inside.

At this point, deputies who responded to the 911 call were already at the family home and speaking with Alex. He told them what happened and said his daughter needed a mental health evaluation. The MPs listened. But as their radios crackled to life, they suddenly told Alex that they had to leave.

Back at the train station, the fire department arrived and Miriam heard the hum of a helicopter overhead.

Then an officer went to the car and asked her: “Is your daughter in there?” 45 minutes passed before he told her that Johanna was dead.

Miriam, stunned, followed him in and waited for her husband to arrive. The couple hoped for answers, but instead, they said, officers separated them for questioning. In return, the MPs provided little information.

Six weeks later they still haven’t done it.

One thing Johanna’s parents actually got was the opportunity to view surveillance footage from inside the sheriff’s station. But Alex and Miriam didn’t want to remember their daughter that way. Instead, the family’s lawyer – Delaney Miller – watched the film with Johanna’s older brother.

For Miller, watching the footage was stressful. Afterwards he had more questions. He still wanted to know who the deputy was and how a 17-year-old girl was able to get his gun so quickly. But he also wondered why the deputy seemed to become careless when he opened the door.

“She was knocking on the door for 30 seconds and they had already received a call about a person matching her description who was in distress,” Miller said. “And the way that door was opened without the holster protecting it is disturbing. They expect police officers to be prepared for anything and not make the situation worse.”

Multiple sources within the department — who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly — expressed the same concerns, noting that their training taught them to be on guard and protect their weapons .

“He should have opened the door with his non-armed hand,” an officer said. “We are trained to keep our weapon side away from anyone we come into contact with.”

But for Daniel, it wasn’t those worries that preoccupied him most after watching the footage from the night his sister died.

“I could see how much pain she was in,” he said. “I was just watching her face.”

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A month and a half after Johanna’s death, her family still feels her presence. Her picture looms large over her living room. Sometimes Daniel briefly thinks he hears her voice.

The family built a shrine right in the entrance area, which they planned to leave for 40 days. Inside were pictures to remember her, candles to help her soul find its way, and water in case her soul became thirsty. Breaking with tradition, there was also a cup of Propel.

As Alex watched the liquid disappear a little more each day, he knew it was evaporation. But part of him still hoped: Maybe it was her.