Officer punched Oscar Grant and lied about facts in 2009 killing, records show

A recently unsealed file noted how transit officer Anthony Pirone ‘started a cascade of events that led to the shooting’ of the unarmed black man

Sam Levin in Oakland
Thu 2 May 2019 21.12 BST Last modified on Thu 2 May 2019 21.21 BST

A police officer involved in the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant on an Oakland train platform repeatedly lied to investigators and had punched the unarmed 22-year-old without justification, according to newly released records.

The report on the New Year’s Eve killing, which sparked national police accountability protests, was disclosed this week following journalists’ requests under a new California police transparency law. The previously sealed internal file, written 10 years ago, documented how the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) officer Anthony Pirone “started a cascade of events that ultimately led to the shooting”. Pirone called Grant the N-word while detaining him, hit him in the face in an “unprovoked” attack, and later gave a series of false statements contradicted by videos, investigators said.

The death of the young father was one of the first major US police brutality cases in which cellphone footage went viral, prompting widespread outrage years before the Black Lives Matter movement. The killing was later made famous by Ryan Coogler’s 2014 film Fruitvale Station, named after the site of the death.

The officer who shot Grant in the back, Johannes Mehserle, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a rare criminal trial over a killing by law enforcement.

The newly disclosed report, written by a law firm hired by Bart to investigate the case amid intense scrutiny in 2009, offers new insights into the authorities’ formal conclusions in the months after Grant’s death. It also reveals Bart’s understanding of the ways Pirone escalated the situation and then lied about Grant’s actions in an effort to paint him as an aggressor.

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