On the one-year anniversary of the day their father was shot and killed by two Sacramento sheriff’s deputies, sisters Bobbi Attaway and Sierra Rivera returned to the suburban street where he died, and where they thought they could still see traces of his blood staining the asphalt.
Official reports on the shooting last September had left the teenagers with questions they hoped to answer by standing in the place where Jesse Attaway’s life ended, at the same time he was shot. As the low fall sun dissolved the night, they debated what officers could have and should have seen in that gray hour, and why deputies felt threatened enough to fire about 20 rounds at a father the girls described as funny and non-confrontational.
How, they wondered, could the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office say in its review of the incident that Attaway was smirking at officers, when officers also said it was dark enough that they couldn’t distinguish that the object he held in his hands was a wallet, not a gun?
How could Attaway, 41, have methamphetamine in his system, as a toxicology report found, when his daughters never knew he did drugs?
Why wouldn’t the Sheriff, Scott Jones, let them see the dashcam video?
Daylight brought no answers.
“Every single bit of information I’ve heard from the police has contradicted itself,” said Rivera, 19, sitting at a nearby Starbucks a few weeks later. “First they said they put the spotlight on him. Then they said it was pitch black. Then they said there were street lights. Then they said they saw his face? They saw him smirk? How? You can see him smile or smirk at you in a sarcastic way …. But you can’t see what’s in his hand?”
Her little sister, Bobbi, 17, nervously chain-smoked while she tried to explain why she was speaking publicly about her father’s death months after it happened, and why the sisters and their mother are in the process of filing a lawsuit against the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department to force more disclosure. Well-spoken and with a composed maturity greater than her years – she had a baby, Dominick, at 15 and is raising him while completing her GED – Bobbi rubbed her hand across her throat when asked about her dad, like something was physically stopping her words.
“I don’t know why, the words won’t come out. I know what I’m saying in my head,” she said. “It’s just all so mixed up. It’s messed up that this family and his daughters are being told all these lies, or could be not lies, and giving us a whole different perspective on our father when we loved him our whole life. … I want to know the truth. I want to know the full story.”
Bobbi Attaway and Rivera have hired local civil rights attorney Stewart Katz to push the sheriff’s office for more information about Attaway’s shooting, and have filed a claim with the county – a required precursor to a lawsuit.
The young women would also like to see similar transparency and accountability reforms in the Sheriff’s Department as those adopted by Sacramento police this year, including wider release of critical incident videos, body cameras for officers and increased training and availability of non-lethal weapons.
“I don’t want to be scared of cops,” said Attaway. “I am scared of them not being trained enough to know what to do.”
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