Oxnard, California: Suicidal Woman Shot Dead by Police

April 4, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Meagan Hockaday, a 26-year-old Black woman, had depression and needed help. She was suicidal and trying to cut herself. On the evening of March 28, her boyfriend, wanting to get help for her, called 911 in the southern California city of Oxnard. According to an Oxnard activist, her boyfriend had been holding her down trying to stop her from cutting herself. When the doorbell rang, he got up to answer it. Meagan got up too, still holding the knife. It’s not clear if she even knew the police were there. Roger Garcia of the Oxnard Police Department entered the apartment and opened fire, shooting Meagan four or five times. Twenty seconds after Garcia entered the apartment, Meagan was dead.

Meagan’s mom described her as a tiny person who could have easily been disarmed. This is the second time Garcia opened fire on a mentally distressed woman. In 2014 he and two other officers fired 36 shots at Rosa Guillen (who survived), after responding to a report of a suicidal woman at an Oxnard park.

Meagan Hockaday left three children, ages 4, 2½, and 7 months.

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This is not just about one “bad apple” in one police department. Why do the cops carry out these outrages—time after time, in cities across the country? It’s because, as Bob Avakian, says, “The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.” (BAsics 1:24)

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