R. Scott Moxley last year brought us “The Execution of Andy Tran,” which detailed how Garden Grove police officers used a Taser to kill a mentally disabled Vietnamese man who was complying with their commands.
Garden Grove settled the federal civil rights lawsuit brought by the 32-year-old's family, but the city insisted the amount remain secret. The secret is out now: the family got $1.3 million.
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Moxley's column is about how cops at the scene fucked up in killing the man who was a stay-at-home dad of a 3-year-old due to a disability caused by schizophrenia. The police department then launched “a callous, six-figure cover-up campaign” that included smearing Tran as a violent drug user, burglar and troublemaker who brought about his own death. As Moxley reports, the Orange County Register dutifully reported the cops' version of events and smear campaign–and later failed to correct the record when many “facts” were proven to be false.
Here is the ironic part: It was the Register's public records request that just now resulted in the public discovery of the financial settlement reached last year.
Pray they got it right this time.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.