Days after moving forward with the case against a San Francisco police officer charged with manslaughter in the 2017 shooting death of a man on his doorstep, the San Francisco Attorney’s Office announced it would drop the case.
A deputy prosecutor, Brooke Jenkins, last week announced plans to hold a preliminary hearing on September 6 in Officer Kenneth Cha’s case, the latest of three counts of violence filed by former district attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by voters in the electorate last year. Jenkins’ office dismissed the other two cases.
The 2017 incident marked the first time a police shooting was filmed with an officer’s body camera in San Francisco.
Sean Moore can be seen on the steps of his home in bodycam video taken by the San Francisco Police Department before he was shot by Kenneth Cha. | Courtesy of SFPD
Cha shot and killed Sean Moore on January 6 of this year during an altercation at Moore’s home in the Ocean View neighborhood. Four months after the shooting of Moore, Cha fatally shot a knife-armed suspect at a Market Street Subway restaurant.
Moore, who suffered from mental health issues that may have played a role in his interaction with Cha, died in 2020 while serving time in San Quentin State Prison for an unrelated incident. Cha was charged with involuntary manslaughter by then-prosecutor Boudin in 2021. In July 2022, the case was taken over by a new assistant district attorney after Jenkins was appointed district attorney following Boudin’s recall. Several delays in the case followed.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins addresses the San Francisco Standard on May 31, 2023. | Justin Katigbak for The Standard
The firing was first reported by Mission Local on Sunday. In a statement, Jenkins said her office could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Cha “did not act in reasonable self-defense.”
She pointed to an unreleased internal report by former District Attorney George Gascón’s office that cited insufficient evidence that Cha or two other responding officers broke the law in the incident.
“Mr. Moore’s subsequent death, tragic as it is, has not changed the analysis based on events at the time of the incident,” Jenkins said in the statement.
Rebecca Young, an attorney representing Moore’s family, called prosecutors’ sudden about-face in the case “doubtful” and “idiotic.”
Young said that Ken Blackmon, Moore’s brother, was so angry when Assistant District Attorney Darby Williams called the family on Friday about the decision not to press charges against Cha that he refused to speak to her and hung up.
On Monday, Cha’s attorney, Scott Burrell, hailed the firing as a “bold and correct move.” He called the officer’s trip “a cautionary tale that when a prosecutor’s office prioritizes politics over compliance, everyone is in danger.”
