GARDENA, Calif. — “I got here at 6 p.m., just after he was shot. They didn’t move his body out until nine or 10 hours later. They wouldn’t let the family see him. The cops took all the cameras, cleaned up the evidence,” Jackson Romero told the Militant about the June 18 killing of his 18-year-old cousin, Andres Guardado, by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.
Romero was part of the crowd of 600 who marched over 3 miles from where Guardado was killed to the sheriffs’ station in neighboring Compton.
Two deputies chased Guardado as he was working as a security guard at a friend’s auto body shop and one fired six shots at him. The cops claim Guardado had a gun and was running away from them. His family says he didn’t have a gun and was shot in the back.
“You don’t want your kids, so young and with their whole lives ahead of them, to have their life unfairly destroyed,” Guardado’s father Christopher said, coming forward to speak to those at the demonstration.
“It’s been four days and nothing has happened,” protester Amalia Soto, who lives a few blocks from where the killing took place, told the Militant. “We don’t have the names of the cops who shot him, or anything else.” The cops say the deputies weren’t equipped with body cameras.