Looking back at the police officer-involved shooting that rocked race relations in San Diego

Before George Floyd and Rodney King, there was Sagon Penn, whose fatal confrontation with two police officers sparked racial tensions that many San Diegans didn’t even know were charged.

In March 1985, two San Diego police officers pulled over the young black man in the Encanto neighborhood. The altercation turned violent. Penn, a martial arts student who was also a practicing Buddhist, fought off the two white officers. Penn, who was lying on the ground, grabbed a gun from one of them and shot them both, killing one and nearly killing the other. He then shot a civilian riding with him and fled in a police car.

The 23-year-old confessed to killing Officer Thomas Riggs and wounding Officer Donovan Jacobs and his co-driver Sarah Pina-Ruiz.

Two narratives emerged: Either the police were attacked while doing their job, or it was a case of police brutality and self-defense. However, most agreed that the case was probably a piece of cake for law enforcement. But that wouldn’t be the end of the story.

A recently published book, “Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice and the True Story of Sagon Penn,” looks back at the story that shook the region.

“The incident itself and the trial are amazing,” said author Peter Houlahan. “But what really connected me to the story is when you start to see the layers of the impact on the city.”

The book hit shelves in July after Houlahan spent four and a half years not only researching the trial but also understanding the community. Perhaps the hardest part was evaluating the lasting impact of the nearly 40-year-old case, he said.

“I think San Diego has certainly become more aware of the problems that it was dealing with, that it hadn’t been dealing with,” he said. One of them, he said, was that southeast San Diego was facing the same problems as larger cities — “violence, guns, harder drugs, meaner street gangs” — more than the rest of the city realized. The Penn case laid bare the disparity.

Change would follow the Penn case, including the creation of the Citizens Advisory Board on Police/Community Relations, which was intended to promote cooperation and communication. Steps were also taken to better ensure officer safety, from better holsters to requirements to wear bulletproof vests, the author said.

‘A volcano about to erupt’

In 1985, conservative San Diego was parochial, seeing itself more as a military and beach town than the big city it had become. A year earlier, it had been the scene of a massacre at a San Ysidro McDonald’s, when an active shooter killed 21 people and wounded 17. And in 1979, a 16-year-old girl named Brenda Spencer used a scoped rifle and opened fire on students walking to an elementary school in her San Carlos neighborhood, killing eight children and three adults. Two of the adults died.

And in the seven years before that, seven San Diego police officers were fatally shot in the line of duty. (For comparison, in the past 30 years, four San Diego police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty.)

The city’s police chief at the time — Bill Kolender, who later became sheriff — had been trying to improve race relations in San Diego even before the incident. “This wasn’t a case of a police department with pervasive racism that just didn’t care,” Houlahan said, adding that Kolender “was considered one of the most progressive” chiefs. The book notes that on his first day as chief, Kolender convened his command staff to recommend an internal crackdown on racial slurs and sexist jokes. And after studying officer behavior in southeast San Diego, he implemented “aggressive reforms.” That was before Penn.

On March 31, 1985, officers were searching for a gang member with a gun when they confronted Penn as he drove his grandfather’s pickup truck, loaded with several black teenagers and men. They were in a long driveway on a dead-end stretch of Brooklyn Avenue, about a block north of the streetcar tracks.

Dozens of witnesses saw the ensuing violence. One woman called 911 to report “police brutality” in her front yard. The shooting happened while she was on the phone.

The conflicting stories – legitimate police work ending in a violent attack or self-defense after an assault – quickly emerged.

Houlahan’s book notes that a conservative op-ed writer for the San Diego Union quickly sided with the police, saying that officers “don’t beat up citizens” and that he ignored any racial aspects. Local TV news anchor Michael Tuck pushed back in his “Perspective” articles. The newspaper’s ombudsman later wrote a column noting that the paper’s article was “not balanced,” Houlahan said. Black community leaders urged patience and restraint from the community.

“In just two weeks, the Sagon Penn incident exposed a social divide that had been building in San Diego since the dramatic increase in the 1970s,” Houlahan wrote. His book cites statements by community leaders in southeast San Diego who spoke of the “great anger in our communities” and said the area was “a volcano waiting to erupt.”

The trial produced bombshells and conflicting testimonies and allegations. There was a struggle over medical evidence as to whether Penn had been beaten and a defense demonstration to show that he had. Jurors also saw a demonstration in a parking garage to hear testimony about who had been where.

The injured officer testified. So did the woman who had ridden with Riggs. So did several witnesses. The trial lasted nine weeks. The jury deliberated for weeks, and there were unexpected developments.

Ultimately, Penn was acquitted of murder. He was then acquitted again at a second trial, this time of manslaughter. Lesser charges stalled and were dismissed.

The lack of cable news and social media

The Encanto shooting was not caught on video. Six years after the Penn case, in 1991, a bystander filmed the Los Angeles police beating Rodney King. That video burned itself into the public consciousness.

The officers in the King incident were acquitted of wrongdoing by a jury, and several West Coast cities erupted in riots. But unrest in San Diego was relatively low-key, observers told Houlahan. Some suggested that there was a connection to the Penn case, that San Diego had already gone through its own trauma, its own recent reckoning.

There is little doubt that if the Penn trial had taken place today, the incident likely would have been captured on officers’ body cameras and on several bystanders’ cellphones. It would have made national news, generated livestreams of the gavel-to-gavel trial, and prompted commentary on social media.

“It’s a really good case study in how something unfolded in the absence of those things,” Houlahan said. “Because those things are playing such a big role now, flooding the zone with rumors, innuendo, polarization.”

In the Penn case, he noted, everyone got their information from the same sources – newspapers and local TV stations – and that had “a moderating effect.”

“There was definitely polarization (when) things started to flare up, but I think San Diego ultimately became a city that showed restraint and patience,” he said. “This seemed like a city that was trying to do the right thing. Certainly, two juries trying to do the right thing, regardless of who agreed with it or not.”

Years of research

Houlahan, a student at UC San Diego from 1979 to 1984, left the year before the deadly confrontation. He learned of the case in 2019 from a friend. The An East Coast author had just completed another book, “Norco ’80,” the true story of an extremely violent 1980 bank robbery that Houlahan says became the gateway drug to the militarization of police.and he quickly became fascinated with Penn’s case. He began his investigation months before the world knew the name George Floyd, before the country was in an uproar over the clash between law enforcement and racial injustice, as it had so many times before.

Houlahan found Penn’s name in 1,400 newspaper articles from San Diego and Los Angeles in the two decades after the shooting.

He found some information in court records, but the gold mine — from 911 calls to recorded interrogations with Penn to trial transcripts and an old reenactment video of the incident — was in the basement of the law office of Penn’s attorney, Milt Silverman.

Silverman himself described the case as “the largest, most divisive, racially charged criminal trial in San Diego history.” During the legal battle, the veteran attorney was the subject of threats and began carrying a gun.

The outcome of the cases made Silverman a local legal legend, and he continued his passion for not taking cases, but cases. He would later represent others who had been falsely accused and win. Silverman died in May before he had a chance to read the book.

Houlahan’s work also brought him into contact with the man who prosecuted the case, Mike Carpenter, who the author describes as “very kind, very helpful, very thoughtful.” Carpenter has since moved to another state.

The widow of slain officer Riggs spoke with Houlahan for the book. Pina-Ruiz, the ride-along officer who shot Penn, died of cancer several years ago. Jacobs, the wounded officer, left law enforcement and became a lawyer in 1992. He did not contribute to the book and did not respond to requests for comment from the Union-Tribune.

Penn’s life after the acquittals was full of problems, unrest and several confrontations with the police.

In 2002 he committed suicide. His mother found him with a suicide note.

Originally published: August 11, 2024 at 5:00 AM