{"id":44025,"date":"2025-11-11T00:41:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/44025\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:41:13","slug":"san-antonio-officers-found-not-guilty-in-melissa-perez-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/44025\/","title":{"rendered":"San Antonio Officers Found Not Guilty in Melissa Perez Shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday\u2019s verdict in an historic case \u2014 San Antonio\u2019s first-ever murder case in a police shooting \u2014 followed a month-long trial of the former officers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Five women and seven men deliberated for less than two hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They found Nathanial Villalobos, Alfred Flores, and Eleazar Alejandro not guilty on all counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alejandro\u2019s small frame leaned into his attorney Mario Del Prado as he tried to hold back tears.<\/p>\n

A crowded defense bench flanked all three clients. In closing arguments, the half-dozen attorneys all made references to the tragic loss of life. One gave the family a small gift, an inuksuk, an arctic trail marker meant for navigation.<\/p>\n

After the verdict was read and the jury released, 379th District Court Judge Ron Rangel turned to the family of slain 46-year-old Melissa Perez, including her four children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe jury wanted me to tell the family they were very sorry for your loss,\u201d said Rangel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perez was killed in the early hours of June 23, 2023 after three officers shot her through a locked glass door. She was one of 22 people shot by San Antonio Police that year, according to reporting from KSAT<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perez\u2019s 26-year-old daughter, Alexis Tovar, previously told The Barbed Wire<\/a> that she simply couldn\u2019t see how her 130-pound mother posed a threat to three physically fit policemen.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the family stood and exited the courtroom in silence.<\/p>\n

It was a quiet end for a killing that made national headlines and drew intense scrutiny for the San Antonio police force over how it treats the mentally ill. The trial was the first one to see murder charges levied against police officers for using deadly force in the city, the seventh largest in the country. It involved more than a hundred hours of testimony and hours of body camera footage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prosecutors continued to argue the police were the architects of the scenario that led to Perez\u2019s death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey set up a situation where it was a dangerous game of chicken,\u201d said David Lunan, Chief of the Felony Criminal Trial Division for Bexar County, in his closing argument.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the jury determined that Lunan\u2019s team failed to meet the high threshold to prove the three officers did not fear for their lives as Perez rushed at them with a hammer, despite being behind a locked glass door.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Police are given wide latitude in the use of deadly force in \u201csplit-second\u201d decisions. As The Barbed Wire previously reported<\/a>, police are rarely charged<\/a> in such shootings and even more rarely convicted.<\/p>\n

In the early hours of that night in June 2023, Perez was found cutting the fire alarm wires at her apartment complex, triggering an alarm that evacuated her building; the told fire personnel that she believed the FBI was using the fire alarm equipment to surveil her. Perez was schizophrenic, which she disclosed to officers on the scene. After a brief interaction with fire and police responders, she fled to her ground-level apartment. During those early interactions, as police attempted to get into her apartment to arrest her for criminal mischief, she struck one by throwing a prayer candle through an open window at him. This caused other officers to respond, including Flores, Alejandro, and Villalobos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Defense attorneys argued that police had a duty to enter the home as she had committed a felony, then struck an officer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The three men arrived more than two hours into the police call. During the trial, prosecutors argued that the response up until that point had only made things worse, aggravating a woman suffering from a mental health episode, which they said should have been clear to the three officers. Their attorneys claimed it was never communicated by first responders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perez was shot to death by the three officers as she rushed at them with a hammer. The men were trying to enter a back glass patio door that was locked. They fired their weapons into the home. Alejandro and Flores\u2019 bullets struck and killed her. All three men were arrested within 24 hours for murder, a charge that was later dropped against Villalobos, whose bullets missed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Defense attorneys were able to use the quick arrest and mistaken initial charge to their advantage, claiming the police were railroading the officers over a politically fraught situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPolice Chief McManus didn\u2019t like that a mentally ill woman got shot\u2026neither did we,\u201d said Jason Goss, one of Villalobos\u2019s attorneys. The San Antonio mayor and city council also condemned the shooting \u2014 publicly \u2014 at the time.<\/p>\n

He argued that the desire to distance the department from the tragedy led to a botched investigation. They presented multiple experts to expand on their narrative that the shooting was justified and the men\u2019s fear from the woman was reasonable. The prosecutors\u2019 team dismissed the experts as union-backed \u2014 and attempting to maintain the status quo, where police decisions are not challenged.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The prosecution did not present an expert witness on the use of deadly force to counter the defense\u2019s perspective, however. Several of their witnesses on SAPD policy were blocked after defense attorneys argued that the policy did not influence whether the men committed a crime.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The family filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit two weeks after the shooting against the three officers, the police department, and the city of San Antonio. It was dismissed in September, but their civil attorney said they filed an appeal on Nov. 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel robbed because I didn\u2019t get to say bye,\u201d Perez\u2019s daughter told The Barbed Wire in October. \u201cI didn\u2019t get to hug her. Talk to her one last time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday\u2019s verdict in an historic case \u2014 San Antonio\u2019s first-ever murder case in a police shooting \u2014 followed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[294,7301,82,84,83,6289,6290,6291],"class_list":["post-44025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-crime","tag-police-shooting","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-tb1","tag-tb2","tag-tb3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}