Read our editorial on the increased reactionization of the state here.
Police officer Jose Mateo will no longer face charges of manslaughter for the massacre of UPS driver Frank Ordonez, 27, and bystander Richard Cutshaw, 70 year old union steward, by Mateo and 19 other police during a pursuit of alleged jewel thieves in the Miami-Dade area in 2019. The Broward County circuit judge Ernest Kollra, Jr. ruled on 9/18 that Mateo cannot be charged with manslaughter as his actions were justified under Florida’s reactionary “Stand Your Ground” law. Three other officers still face manslaughter charges for the 2019 massacre.
In December 2019, two alleged jewelry store robbers hijacked a UPS truck driven by Ordonez. According to the police, the robbers then fled in the truck while holding Ordonez hostage, leading the police on a chase that ended in a traffic jam in Miramar, Florida, at which point at least 20 police officers took cover behind cars filled with people, using them as human shields, and opened fire on the truck, firing a total of 221 rounds.
With their hail of bullets, the police killed the two alleged robbers as well as Ordonez and Cutshaw, who was stopped in his vehicle several cars ahead of the UPS truck. Autopsy reports show that Ordonez was hit 12 times, all by police rounds, while the single round that killed Cutshaw was also from the police’s indiscriminate mass shooting.
In a further perverse effect of bourgeois justice, only four of the 20 or more officers who committed the massacre had charges presented against them, as theirs were the only weapons which could be definitively linked to the rounds which ended the lives of the four victims.
The prosecution against Mateo plans to appeal the ruling and argues that Stand Your Ground law does not apply to the officers in the case, as the victims Ordonez and Cutshaw were not aggressors—it is only the police narrative which poses the alleged hijackers as direct threats to the police, also, as lawyers representing the families of the victims argued that the police fired first, and without any attempt to free the hostage, prompting the alleged hijackers to return fire.
“Stand Your Ground” is the term for a set of laws which allow the use of deadly force without retreat in self-defense, used to justify and clear the perpetrators of reactionary terror.
As a UPS driver, Ordonez was a member of the Teamsters union. In 2019, his local’s leadership released a statement blaming the hijackers for using Ordonez as a human shield instead of the police who actually massacred him, Cutshaw, and the hijackers who were executed without the right to a trial. Thus the Teamsters brass joined with the ultra-reactionary Miami-Dade Police Benevolent Association in defending the police massacre, with the police association saying that the presentation of manslaughter charges for 4 of the 20 officers would have a “chilling effect”—apparently on the police’s ability to commit massacres at will.
The judge’s clearing of Mateo’s charges extends the reactionization of US society, a project of US imperialism attempting to overcome its cyclical economic crisis at the expense of the democratic rights of the people and the conditions of the working class, which includes increased impunity for police terror.
Image: Portraits of Frank Ordonez and Richard Cutshaw, retrieved from ABC news, courtesy of the families.
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