A former Philadelphia police officer who admitted to killing a 12-year-old boy who was running away was given at least eight years in jail on Monday.
After five years on the job, Edsaul Mendoza was fired a week after the shooting in 2022. In April, he admitted to killing Thomas “T.J.” Siderio and was charged with third-degree murder.
Just before he was given a term of 8 to 20 years in prison, Mendoza told the judge that he felt sad and sorry. He was charged with first- and third-degree murder, as well as voluntary manslaughter, at first, but he agreed to a plea deal. A message was sent to his lawyer asking for a response, but exact details of the sentencing rules weren’t available right away.
Lawyers for the prosecution said the 12-year-old boy was on the ground and not carrying a gun when Mendoza shot him in the back and killed him. Police said the young person had first shot at an undercover police car, hurting one of the four officers who were inside.
According to the police, the boy threw a gun down about 40 feet before he was shot. He then either tripped or fell to the ground.
Larry Krasner, the district attorney for Philadelphia, said that surveillance tape showed some of the officer’s statements to be false. Among those was Mendoza’s claim that the boy pointed a gun at him and that he was standing in the street when he shot, not on the path almost on top of him, as prosecutors told a grand jury.
Police say that four cops were going around in an unmarked car looking for a teen they wanted to talk to about an investigation into guns. When they saw Siderio and a 17-year-old who wasn’t named, they turned the car around the block and stopped next to them.
Prosecutors said that the police turned on their red and blue lights almost at the same time that a shot went through the back passenger window and around the car. One cop was taken to the hospital because broken glass hurt his eye and face.
Police say that Mendoza and another cop on the passenger side got out and fired one shot each. Mendoza then chased Siderio down the block, shooting twice and hitting the boy in the back once from “relatively close range,” according to the charges.
