The FBI arrested nine current and former California police officers on Thursday as part of a major criminal investigation into racist text messages of dozens of law enforcement officials, prosecutors said.
Early-morning federal raids, first reported by the Bay Area News Group, rounded up officers from Antioch and Pittsburg, two cities east of San Francisco, after they were charged in four grand jury indictments.
The arrests come after revelations that Antioch officers sent violently racist, misogynistic and anti-gay text messages between 2019 and 2022. The hateful messages emerged as part of an inquiry by federal officials and local prosecutors investigating claims of widespread civil rights violations, excessive force and falsification of records.
Officers were exposed referring to Black people as “gorillas” and bragging about beating up local residents and fabricating evidence. Some group texts included supervisors. In April, it was revealed that more than 45 officers, representing nearly half of Antioch’s police department, were implicated in racist behavior.
Six current and former officers from the Antioch and Pittsburg departments – Patrick Berhan, Morteza Amiri, Amanda Theodosy, Samantha Peterson, Ernesto Mejia-Orozco and Brauli Rodriguez-Jalapa – were indicted for wire fraud in a college scam case. Officers claimed they had earned degrees which gave them salary bumps, but in actuality had hired others to take classes and exams for them, said US attorney Ismail Ramsey.
In a second indictment, Daniel Harris and Devon Wenger of the Antioch police department were accused of distributing and possessing anabolic steroids. The third indictment involves a single defendant – Timothy Manly-Williams, a former Antioch officer – who was charged with obstruction and destroying, altering and falsifying records. While assigned to monitor a wiretap as part of a murder investigation, he used his personal phone to call the target of the wiretap and prevented it from being recorded, Ramsey said. He was also accused of confiscating and destroying a civilian’s phone after the victim had recorded the aftermath of an arrest.
The fourth indictment alleges widespread civil rights violations by three Antioch officers – Amiri, Wenger and Eric Rombough – including improperly using weapons and a K-9 dog, boasting about their illegal uses of forces, sharing graphic photos of their victims’ injuries and collecting ammunition as mementos of their attacks.
As of Thursday afternoon, six of the defendants had pleaded not guilty and were released, most with $100,000 bonds, the newspaper reported. They are facing 10 to 20 years behind bars on most of the charges.
Amiri and Rombough, both charged in the civil rights case, were previously exposed by the text messages scandal. In one uncovered text, Amiri said, “I sometimes just say people gave me a full confession when they didn’t. Gets filed easier.” In another, Rombough wrote, “I’m only stopping them cuz they black.”
Several disturbing conversations were included in the indictment. In one 2019 exchange between the two, Rombough texted, “Yeah buddy we gonna fuck some people up,” and Amiri responded: “exactly! blood for blood.” In February 2020, when Amiri referred to a group of people as a “bunch of gorillas”, Rombough responded, “I can shoot a few on Sunday.” Amiri also sent photos of eight victims’ injuries to Wenger, saying, “a very eventful work week”, and including laughing emojis.
The attorney for Rombough criticized the FBI raid in court, saying, “There is absolutely no reason for Mr Rombough to appear here in handcuffs today.” That attorney and lawyers for Amiri, who was also charged in the college fraud indictment, did not immediately respond to inquiries, and it was not immediately clear who was representing the other defendants.
More than 100 FBI personnel participated in the arrests of the defendants, which took place across the Bay Area and in Texas and Hawaii, the FBI said, adding that the arrests were the culmination of more than two years of investigations.
Prosecutors have been forced to drop or dismiss dozens of cases that involved the officers who were exposed, and the local county has assigned attorneys to review thousands more files, according to the publication.
“Not only do we have officers who have fundamentally racist ideas and disrespect for the community, but they’re dishonest, too, and that goes to the very integrity of the criminal justice system,” said John Burris, a civil rights attorney who has brought a class-action case against Antioch police. “There was a kind of lawlessness in the department, and there was no accountability. There was a code of silence. These officers understood that there was a freedom to engage in this conduct without having any repercussions and that’s a failure of leadership.”
Victims in the civil rights case have alleged that they were subject to assaults, beatings, false arrests, unreasonable searches and seizures, intimidation, kidnapping, falsified reports, denial of equal protection and racial discrimination. One plaintiff in the case said he was beaten by an officer, who subsequently texted, “I tried to knock him unconscious,” and called him the N-word and a homophobic slur.
Antioch’s mayor, Lamar Thorpe, said in a statement that it was “a dark day in our city’s history, as people trusted to uphold the law, allegedly breached that trust and were arrested by the FBI”. Elected in 2020 on a platform of reform, he added: “To those that have accused me and others of being anti-police for seeking to reform the Antioch police department, today’s arrests are demonstrative of the issues that have plagued the Antioch police department for decades.”
Joe Vigil, acting Antioch police chief, said in a statement on Thursday evening that the announcement of arrests was “disheartening and undermines the incredible work our staff does on a daily basis”, adding: “Any police officer who breaks public trust must be held accountable, especially because our effectiveness relies heavily on confidence and support from our community.”
Antioch has a dark history of racism and violence. For much of the 20th century, the city was known among Black residents as a “sundown town”, where it was unsafe to be out after dark. The police scandal comes at a time when the demographics of the region have shifted. Twenty years ago, Antioch was 65% white, but today white residents make up 35% of the population. The Black population has grown during that time from 9% to 20%.
