In the wake of last weekend's intense protests outside the Fullerton Police Department, Ron Thomas–father of the unarmed man cops brutally killed in 2011–announced Police Chief Dan Hughes has assured him that, though fired officers Manual Ramos, Jay Cicinelli and Joseph Wolfe no longer face criminal charges, he will not willingly rehire them.
Thomas broke the news in a Facebook post urging the public to attend tonight's 6:30 Fullerton City Council meeting but to not blame council members because an Orange County jury handed Ramos and Cicinelli “not guilty” verdicts and prosecutors then decided to drop a pending, pretrial case against Wolfe.
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“I do not see a reason to go into this meeting mad as hell at the city council, as they were not part of the jury,” Thomas wrote on Facebook. “I am asking that concerned citizens attend and voice their opinions, but none of us need violence to get our points across to the council. As for me, I will attend and make some comments, and I will also be thanking Chief Hughes for his continued position as far as reinstating the discharged officers.”
In addition to outrage over the verdicts, activists who believe the officers got away with needlessly killing Kelly Thomas at the Fullerton Transportation Center in July 2011 are now unhappy that Hughes' department used riot police and an armored combat vehicle to intimidate protesters on Saturday.
A White House petition calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to file federal charges against the officers involved in the beating death now has more than 12,300 signatures.
And go HERE to read our report on last weekend's protests.
Fullerton's council chamber is located at 303 W. Commonwealth Ave.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.