INDIO, California — A former Los Angeles police officer who fatally shot a mentally ill man who attacked him in a Costco store will not be retried for voluntary manslaughter, prosecutors said.
Salvador Sanchez will not face a second trial for killing 32-year-old Kenneth French and wounding his parents in 2019 during a confrontation at a store in Corona, southeast of Los Angeles, the attorney general’s office said last week .
A mistrial was declared last month after jurors in Riverside County deadlocked with a majority in favor of acquittal.
Prosecutors decided against a new trial “after considering a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, input from the surviving victims and feedback from the jury,” the California Department of Justice said in a statement last Friday.
Sanchez and his family “feel humbled and grateful to God for the outcome,” his attorney, Michael Schwartz, told Riverside Press-Enterprise after the decision.
“The stress on the Sanchez family, both emotionally and financially, has been enormous,” Schwartz said.
Sanchez was off-duty and holding his young son in his arms when French knocked him to the ground from behind at the Costco in June 2019. The officer fired seconds later, fatally wounding French and seriously wounding the man’s parents, Russell and Paola French.
French was nonverbal and had recently been taken off unspecified medication due to other health problems, the family’s attorney had said, adding that the change may have affected his behavior that evening. French’s family believes he suffered from schizophrenia.
While Sanchez told investigators he believed French had a gun and that his life was in danger, authorities said French was not armed and was driving away from Sanchez when the officer began shooting.
The attorney general filed charges of voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a firearm against Sanchez in 2021 after a Riverside County grand jury returned no charges.
Sanchez was a seven-year veteran of the LAPD at the time of the shooting. He was fired in 2020 after the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners ruled his actions violated department policy.
A federal jury awarded $17 million to French’s parents in a wrongful death lawsuit in 2021.