SAN ANTONIO – Two Bexar County deputies who shot and killed a man in 2015 as his hands were raised used excessive and unnecessary force, a federal jury found on Thursday.
After three days of testimony, the jury ultimately sided with the family of Gilbert Flores, who was fatally shot outside his Northwest Side home by deputies Greg Vazquez and Robert Sanchez on Aug. 28, 2015.
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In total, the jury decided to award Flores’ family members $10,370,000.
On Tuesday, Flores’ wife Maritza Amador said he assaulted her while she was holding their newborn baby. When deputies arrived, Flores confronted them with a knife.
Video emerged after the shooting from a bystander that showed Flores in a 12-minute confrontation with deputies Greg Vasquez and Robert Sanchez outside the home. In the seconds leading up to shots being fired, it appears that Flores had surrendered and had his hands up.
A video shot by a bystander was shown to the jury and it was shown frame-by-frame during testimony by a forensics digital analyst.
The analyst concluded that, for about four seconds, Flores’ hands, the knife he was holding and his feet were not moving when the deputies fired two shots at him.
Vasquez, the first deputy at the scene and the first one to fire a shot at Flores, defended his actions during his testimony.
“I was trying to de-escalate the whole time I was there,” Vasquez said on the stand.
Vasquez explained that Flores had lunged at him several times with his knife, taken his stun gun after striking him with it and was also looking inside his patrol unit.
“The situation was getting bad to worse,” Vasquez said.
Lawyers for the Flores family pushed Vasquez on the fact that Flores had his hands up and doesn’t appear to be lunging at him when he fired the shot. Vasquez responded by saying Flores was still a threat as long as he was holding the knife.
Bexar County has now turned the defense of the case over to the county’s insurance carrier, according to the District Attorney’s Office.