News/Commentary

California jury finds man who beat and shot at female deputy NOT GUILTY, despite video

June 9, 2023 | | Print Article

A video shows former San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy Meagan McCarthy getting brutally beaten and then shot at by a suspect in 2019, but shockingly, an obviously anti-police California jury came back and found him not guilty of attempted murder and other charges.

(Video Credit: Fox News)

McCarthy spoke with Fox News on Wednesday and said that it sets a bad and dangerous precedent for law enforcement everywhere.

She answered a panicked 911 call from a mother who begged dispatch for someone to save her from her own son and, in the process, McCarthy was almost killed.

The deputy rushed to the home and observed a suspect named Ari Young with “clenched fists” who emerged from the home and made a “bee-line” toward her as she got out of her patrol car. The mother was standing behind Young with a knife in her hand and was still on the phone with dispatch.

“The 911 call came out for an unknown problem, which basically means there’s something going on, we just don’t know,” McCarthy told Fox News Digital in an interview. “So the woman on the other end says to dispatch, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God! Get my son out of here.’ And she kind of goes quiet on the line. That prompts a priority 1 response, which means somebody needs to get there right now.”

McCarthy was the first on the scene to confront a “very angry” suspect. The whole incident was caught on a neighbor’s cellphone.

“Based on my training and experience, it was easy to infer that something was going on,” McCarthy recounted. “People don’t just arm themselves against their son with a knife for no reason, and the fact that she had already made these statements to dispatch was just awful.”

McCarthy approached the suspect and tried to calm him so she could pat him down.

“Thirteen seconds into our interaction, he told me, ‘I will headbutt the f*** out of you,'” she recalled. “So I knew his intentions weren’t going to be of compliance.”

The video shows Young beating McCarthy in the face until she fell to the ground. They struggled for the gun, he seized it and began firing it at her. Fortunately, the gun jammed when he pointed it directly at her face. The deputy suffered a broken thumb and a black eye.

Backup arrived on the scene and returned fire. They then took Young into custody. Although deputies shot him, Young survived the altercation and is now a free man.

Young’s defense attorney Raj Malin outrageously argued that McCarthy had no lawful reason to do what she was doing at the scene, and therefore his client was acting in self-defense. The video appears to show something entirely different happening in the incident.

Malin, the defense attorney, told Los Angeles’ ABC 7 that McCarthy did not have a reasonable suspicion to justify patting down his schizophrenic client when she arrived on the scene.

“The issue was, was the initial detention of Mr. Young legal?” he said during the interview. “If it’s not, then he’s not guilty. … He could punch her 100 times, and it wouldn’t matter.”

The jury head-shakingly bought the argument and found Young not guilty of attempted murder and assaulting a police officer. They found him guilty of the lesser charge of negligent discharge of a firearm. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on several other charges, including resisting arrest.

“His whole thing was, I didn’t do my job right. I had no right to detain him. I had no right to search him,” McCarthy explained. “But that’s exactly what we are trained to do. That’s exactly what peace officer standards in training from the state of California says to do. It just set him off. It was like a trigger for him.”

California Republican State Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a former federal prosecutor and deputy district attorney in nearby Riverside County, asserted that the case should have had enough evidence to secure a conviction. He intimated that there may have been anti-police bias at play on the jury.

“[The defense] argued that she didn’t have a lawful authority to detain him, and therefore, he’s free to defend himself and do whatever he wants to get away from her, including beating her up and shooting at her,” Essayli told Fox News Digital in an interview. “That’s not correct. That’s not the law. And I don’t think the judge should have allowed that argument to be presented in that manner.”

The county sheriff was dumbfounded by the lack of “meaningful consequences” in the case.

“The video speaks for itself, and more importantly it demonstrates the increasing violence the public and our deputies experience,” San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Shannon Dicus told Fox News Digital in an interview. “I share in the frustration at the lack of accountability for these brazen and violent crimes, crimes perpetrated by a criminal who created a situation where law enforcement help was requested, a criminal who repeatedly and brutally attacked, disarmed, and tried to murder a deputy sheriff.”

McCarthy has two young daughters to provide for. After the verdict, she was forced to retire due to post-traumatic stress.

“Disbelief, I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I think it took a couple hours to actually hit me.”

“I loved my job,” the former deputy said. “I genuinely woke up every day excited to do what I was supposed to do and what I swore to do. And the fact that that was taken from me without me wanting it, makes me upset.”

“This started from a 911 call from a distraught mother who was so afraid of her adult son that she had a knife in her hand when the police officer got there,” Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and the spokesperson for the National Police Association stated. “He could’ve easily went and killed his mother, maybe that’s what he was trying to do when he fired the weapon. But this isn’t just about the officer, either. What about the original caller — the mother?”

“McCarthy could have chosen to wait for backup, avoiding the situation for crucial minutes,” she pointed out. “Instead she immediately goes to help this woman at great peril to herself. She should be commended — not treated as some kind of second-class citizen by the jury.”

Brantner Smith commented that this sets a bad precedent and could lead to officers hesitating when faced with a crisis in the future which could get them and those they are trying to protect killed.

“She not only gets beat up, stripped of her firearm, and nearly gets killed — she loses her career,” she said referring to McCarthy. “This is how she pays her mortgage, takes care of her family.”

Twitter users were enraged over the verdict:

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