The office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced late Friday that it won’t bring criminal charges against an NYPD officer who, responding to an emergency in October 2020, sped through a red light at 60 mph and fatally struck a young woman crossing a street in The Bronx.
The Office of Special Investigations, which was created in early 2021 to probe cases statewide for potential criminal prosecution of police officers who cause someone’s death, concluded in a 71-page report that it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer, Ceasar Munoz, committed a crime.
The report noted that Munoz took a number of precautionary measures, such as turning on his flashing lights and siren. Those actions would make it difficult to prove he had acted recklessly, the report concluded, adding that allowances for breaking traffic laws in emergency situations would have added to the prosecutorial challenge.
“OSI’s research has not found a case in New York in which a police officer was criminally charged for causing a death when responding to an emergency,” the report said.
Munoz, who worked in the highway unit, told investigators he was responding to a call of an officer who required assistance with an arrest on the Throgs Neck Bridge, and believed he needed to respond urgently — which included driving in a bus lane and at twice the speed limit at times.
He acknowledged not slowing down enough at the red light where he struck 20-year-old Sofia Gomez Aguilon and said his view of her in the crosswalk was obscured by two lanes of cars that were backed up at the light.
“The first time I saw her was basically when I hit her,” he told investigators, according to the report. Munoz said he slammed on the brakes and tried to steer left after seeing Gomez Aguilon, but that it was too late.
Gomez Aguilon, a native of Guatemala, died at Jacobi Medical Center three days later.
Leigh Eskenasi, an attorney for Gomez Aguilon’s family, which filed a lawsuit against the city, the NYPD and Munoz in November 2021 that is still ongoing, said his firm would review the report to see how OSI arrived at its decision not to bring criminal charges.
The NYPD’s press office and an attorney for Munoz didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Two Prosecutions, 16 Cases
The Attorney General’s probe took an unusually long time to conclude when compared to the office’s average case closure time in recent years of about 15 months, according to an analysis by THE CITY.
The case appears to be the oldest one that was still open at OSI, the analysis found, and actually started under an earlier iteration of that unit.
A spokesperson for the office wouldn’t comment directly when asked why the investigation took more than four years, but described the probe as “thorough.”
Earlier this year, the city of Troy paid a $5.8 million settlement to the widow of a 30-year-old pizza delivery driver who was killed by a Troy Police Department officer who sped through a red light going nearly 90 mph while responding to an emergency call of a domestic incident. That case, from February 2023, is still under investigation by the Attorney General.
A review of fatal police car collisions in New York by USA Today published earlier this year found that the state AG has prosecuted just two officers in 16 such cases that were opened since July 2015, with another 13 cases still pending at the time of the review.
Both prosecutions occurred after James took office in 2019.
Just five months after Gomez Aguilon’s death, the NYPD brought charges against Munoz for not operating his vehicle in a safe manner, a relatively quick disciplinary action. He was forced to leave the department last year following an internal trial in June 2023 where the administrative judge deemed Munoz’s actions to be “reckless and unsafe.”
Still, Munoz was allowed to retire with his pension rather than being terminated because of his clean disciplinary record, his belief that he was responding to an urgent situation and because of his remorseful demeanor at trial.
“More than once while on the witness stand, [Munoz] became visibly emotional when asked to recount the details of this horrible accident,” wrote the administrative judge, Jeff Adler. “He came across as sincere and remorseful, and his anguish was evident, when he stated that he thinks about this incident every day.”
