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Manuela "Mona" Rodriguez

Age : 18

Gender : Female

Race : Latino/a/e

Date : 09/27/2021

Location : Spring Street and Palo Verde Avenue

City : Long Beach

County : Los Angeles

State : California

Agency : Long Beach Unified School District

Officer(s) :Eddie Gonzalez

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed by school safety officer while leaving altercation

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 09/27/2021, Long Beach Unified School District School Safety Officer Eddie Francisco Gonzalez shot 18-year-old Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez in the back of the head as she sat in a car leaving a parking lot near Millikan High School. Rodriguez suffered catastrophic brain injuries and died on October 5 after being removed from life support. The database date remains September 27, the date Gonzalez shot her.
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Gonzalez was on duty conducting school safety patrol near Millikan High School when he encountered a fight between Rodriguez and a 15-year-old girl in a shopping-center parking lot about a block from campus. Rodriguez was not a student at Millikan. Gonzalez stopped and intervened in the altercation.
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After the fight ended, Rodriguez got into a car with her boyfriend and another person. Cellphone video shows Gonzalez approaching as the car began leaving the parking lot. Gonzalez drew his handgun and fired two shots toward the rear of the moving vehicle. One bullet entered the car and struck Rodriguez in the back of the head.
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Rodriguez was unarmed. The widely circulated video became particularly important because it showed the vehicle moving away as Gonzalez fired and provided independent evidence of the shooting rather than leaving the circumstances dependent on the shooter's account.
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Gonzalez later maintained that he fired because he believed the vehicle was going to strike him. Prosecutors rejected that explanation. At a 2022 preliminary hearing, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Daniel Lowenthal ruled that the murder case could proceed and concluded that Gonzalez had no reasonable basis to believe he was in danger when he fired into the back of the departing car.
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Gonzalez's actions also violated the school district's own firearms policy. LBUSD policy prohibited firing at a fleeing person or at a moving vehicle except as a final means of defense when circumstances clearly warranted deadly force. Following an internal review, the Long Beach Board of Education unanimously fired Gonzalez on October 6. Superintendent Jill Baker said the district concluded that Gonzalez had violated its use-of-force policy.
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Rodriguez remained hospitalized with irreversible brain damage. Her family said she was declared brain dead and fought to keep her on life support long enough to permit organ donation. She died on October 5, approximately eight days after Gonzalez shot her. Her organs were donated to five recipients.
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Rodriguez's family challenged Gonzalez's actions immediately and repeatedly demanded criminal prosecution. Her mother, Manuela Sahagun, brother Oscar Rodriguez and other relatives held demonstrations and public appearances arguing that Gonzalez had no justification for shooting into the fleeing vehicle. The family emphasized that Rodriguez was an 18-year-old mother whose five-month-old son would grow up without her.
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Long Beach police investigated the shooting as a homicide after Rodriguez died. On October 27, 2021, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Gonzalez with murder, an unusually serious criminal prosecution arising from an on-duty killing by a school safety officer. Gonzalez was arrested and later released on $2 million bail while the case proceeded.
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The family's civil action produced a major settlement before the criminal case was resolved. In April 2023, Long Beach Unified School District agreed to pay $13 million to settle the family's wrongful-death lawsuit. The settlement provided compensation for Rodriguez's son and other family members and represented one of the largest school-policing-related settlements arising from a fatal shooting in the region.
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Gonzalez went to trial for second-degree murder in April 2024. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, producing a mistrial. The jury split 7-5, with seven jurors favoring a murder conviction. The jury foreperson later said she was convinced Gonzalez was guilty of murder.
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Rather than face a second murder trial, Gonzalez pleaded no contest on August 20, 2024, to voluntary manslaughter. On October 8, 2024, Superior Court Judge Richard Goul sentenced him to three years. Because Gonzalez received credit for time spent in jail and on electronic monitoring, the sentence amounted to time already served and he was released.
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The final criminal outcome therefore established legal responsibility for Rodriguez's death even though the original murder prosecution did not produce a unanimous verdict: Gonzalez was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for killing her.
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OFFICER BACKGROUND
Eddie Francisco Gonzalez was a school safety officer employed by the Long Beach Unified School District rather than a sworn Long Beach police officer. He was armed and authorized by the district to perform school-safety enforcement duties but was not a school resource officer assigned from a municipal police department.
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Gonzalez's conduct was found to violate his employer's use-of-force policy within days of the shooting. The Long Beach Board of Education unanimously terminated him after its internal review, specifically concluding that firing into the departing vehicle violated district policy governing deadly force against moving vehicles.
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The criminal proceedings produced further independent scrutiny of Gonzalez's decision-making. Prosecutors argued that Gonzalez unnecessarily escalated an incident involving young people and fired into the back of a fleeing vehicle when he could instead have recorded the license plate and contacted police. At the preliminary hearing, a judge found no reasonable basis for Gonzalez's claim that he needed to fire because the vehicle endangered him. Seven of twelve jurors at his later murder trial voted to convict him of second-degree murder, and Gonzalez ultimately pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter.
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The shooting also exposed broader questions about why an armed school-district security force was policing conduct beyond school grounds. Gonzalez encountered Rodriguez in a shopping-center parking lot about a block from Millikan High School while conducting what the district described as “safe passage” patrol. At the time, LBUSD employed armed school safety officers who could detain people and respond to incidents around district facilities even though they were not municipal police officers.
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That structure was already under scrutiny before Rodriguez was killed. Long Beach's racial-equity planning process had recommended reducing the use of school police and reviewing alternative school-safety models. Rodriguez's killing intensified those concerns and generated demands that the district reconsider the role, authority, training and arming of its school safety personnel.
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The district's own response ultimately acknowledged that Gonzalez's shooting was outside its standards. Unlike cases in which a department clears its employee internally despite a disputed fatal shooting, LBUSD fired Gonzalez approximately nine days after he shot Rodriguez. The subsequent $13 million civil settlement and Gonzalez's voluntary-manslaughter conviction reinforced that institutional finding with both civil and criminal consequences.

SOURCE LINKS :

https://da.lacounty.gov/media/news/long-beach-safety-officer-sentenced-shooting-death-18-year-old-woman-near-millikan-high
https://lbpost.com/news/mona-rodriguez-eddie-gonzalez-shooting-death-sentencing/
https://abc7.com/post/mona-rodriguez-shooting-ex-long-beach-school-safety-officer-walks-free-after-being-sentenced-time-served/15406069/
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/family-of-mona-rodriguez-reaches-13m-settlement-with-school-district-in-shooting-death/3128754/
https://www.foxla.com/news/mona-rodriguez-case-13m-settlement-announced-in-fatal-shooting-involving-long-beach-school-officer
https://lbpost.com/news/crime/mona-rodriguez-settlement-13-million-lbusd-safety-officer
https://people.com/crime/calif-teen-shot-dead-school-safety-officer-13m-settlement/
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/long-beach-family-awarded-13-million-settlement-for-fatal-school-resource-officer-shooting-mona-rodriguez/
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/mistrial-declared-in-shooting-death-of-young-mother-in-long-beach/3389999/
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/family-of-teen-shot-by-school-resource-officer-announces-13-million-wrongful-death-settlement/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-06/long-beach-school-district-officials-fire-school-safety-officer-after-internal-review-of-shooting
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-19/murder-charge-upheld-against-ex-long-beach-school-security-officer-in-teens-death
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-09/long-beach-school-officer-convicted-manslaughter-sentenced
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/former-long-beach-school-safety-officer-to-be-sentenced-for-womans-shooting-death/