For the first time in nearly two years, the public heard the voice of a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy imploring his fellow officers to stop shooting a 15-year-old girl on the side of a California highway in broad daylight.
The audio was released more than 500 days after a sheriff’s deputy fatally shot Savannah Graziano. The teenager had been kidnapped the day before by her father, Anthony Graziano, who shot and killed Tracy Martinez – Savannah’s mother and his ex-wife – in Fontana during a domestic dispute near Cypress Elementary School.
Anthony and Savannah Graziano were killed on September 27, 2022, and authorities have provided little information about their deaths.
Video and audio released Friday to independent journalist Joey Scott show the events leading up to a violent shooting on Highway 15 and verify that the teen was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy. They also show that San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus misrepresented important aspects of the case in his public comments following the Savannah shooting — misinterpretations that the department never sought to correct .
The Sheriff’s Department declined further questions regarding the release of information in the Graziano case, which is under investigation by the California Department of Justice.
“I hope this video is watched in its entirety and provides some insight into the unfortunate events that took place that day,” Dicus said in reference to the video of the incident released Friday by his department. “There has been speculation and misrepresentation surrounding this matter, and I would ask the public to allow the DOJ to complete its independent investigation before reaching a conclusion.”
The day after the shooting, Dicus said Savannah rushed toward deputies before she was shot, suggesting she may have posed a threat. But Savannah’s final steps were cautious, according to helicopter footage in a 15-minute incident video narrated by the Sheriff’s Department. Savannah appeared to be crouching low to the ground after getting out of her father’s white truck. The unnamed deputy heard in the audio screams at her amid the sound of gunfire just before she is shot by another deputy.
Dicus also said after the incident that the sheriff investigators determined that Shannon “participated in the shooting of our deputies” during the high-speed chase that preceded his death. In the video, however, the department walked back that assertion, saying whether Shannon shot deputies was still under investigation.
In a statement released Friday, Dicus said he spoke to the media after the shooting “to maintain transparency throughout the process.”
Dicus asked the California Department of Justice to investigate the shooting under Assembly Bill 1506, which allows the state to review a shooting in which an officer is involved to determine whether his actions were justified .
Scott, whose report first appeared in the Guardian, requested information from San Bernardino County under the California Public Records Act in October 2022. For a year and a half, he repeatedly received the same department response: The information was part of an ongoing investigation. investigation, and he would receive an update later.
On Friday, when the county released several videos about the shooting — an edited video summarizing the events leading up to the shooting and unedited video footage from a helicopter and surveillance video — these were accompanied by a statement saying the county had been unable to provide all the evidence earlier due to a ransomware attack in April 2023 that also hampered its ability to provide information to the California Department of Justice.
“Despite extensive and ongoing efforts to resolve this issue, much of the data remained inaccessible,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a statement accompanying the release of the documents. Since then, all of the information sought by state investigators has been made available to them.
Police transparency laws such as Senate Bill 1421 of 2018 and Assembly Bill 748 require disclosure of records related to police shootings, certain uses of force, and any information regarding the injury or death of a person by an officer. But law enforcement is often reluctant to release the information.
“The public is entitled to the whole story, not just the official story,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit.
The organization provided legal advice to Scott and threatened legal action as he sought records from the Sheriff’s Department. Although many questions have been raised around the Graziano case, the one aspect that is clear is that sheriff’s deputies were involved in a shooting and that warrants the release of information, Loy said.
There are legal reasons for withholding documents, Loy said, such as the risk of harm to a confidential source. But the law doesn’t allow a police department to withhold records simply by saying an investigation is underway.
“Once the shooting happened, as tragic as it was, there were no witnesses to interview, there were no confidential sources. “This was an incident that happened in broad daylight on I-15,” he added.
Police departments should allow members of the public to make a decision rather than withhold vital information, Loy said.
“I’m not here to take a position on whether this was a legally justified shooting. But law enforcement officers work for the people and not the other way around,” he said. “They are civil servants. We pay their salaries just like the garbage collectors, planners or clerks. The public therefore effectively has the right to verify its performance.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation, referring a Times reporter to a September 2022 press release about the investigation.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors is kept informed by the Sheriff’s Department of all external investigations into the county, according to David Wert, a county spokesman.
“Based on the information provided, it appears the sheriff is handling these situations appropriately,” Wert said.
The Sheriff’s Department has not released the names of the deputies involved in the shooting.
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