 "Photo: Isaac Thomas / The Advocate")
He was just doing what he was supposed to do.
Police aide Edgar Rocha’s Thursday shift started like all the rest. He put on the bulletproof vest he had purchased himself, his aide uniform and jacket, and set out for the campus to meet up with one of his co-workers.
Just after his shift started at 12:30 p.m., on Nov. 8, 2007, he got a call over the radio from a Police Services officer to split up with a fellow police aide and investigate a possible auto theft in a parking lot on the Shane Drive side of campus.
Rocha, also known as “Roach,” was told to stand at Lot 9, now Lot 10, and to report any suspicious activity. He was looking for a suspect that was allegedly breaking into students’ cars in the parking lot behind the Police Services Office.
“I was looking for this Asian guy,” Rocha said. “Then I see this black guy walking around. Normally, I’d ignore him, but he kept looking back at me.”
Rocha called in the suspicious activity of the person who did not match the suspected car thief’s description, heard there was an officer in the Shane Drive area and went over to talk to him.
As a Police Services patrol car came closer to the suspicious looking man, he “darted,” Rocha said.
“I was (standing) in his way up Shane Drive,” Rocha said.
After that, all he remembers is taking two bullets to the stomach.
“I didn’t hear anything. I couldn’t move my leg,” he said.
Rocha had been shot a block off campus, at the corner of Shane Drive and Mills Avenue, and needed immediate medical attention in order to survive.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “People were telling me to stay down, that I had been shot.”
One bullet was stopped by Rocha’s bulletproof vest, but one ripped through the vest injuring his stomach, pancreas, intestines, liver and diaphragm. Another struck him in his thigh, only an inch from an artery.
Change of direction
Today, 18 months later, Rocha is back at Contra Costa College, on a different career track, but the same person he was three semesters ago.
“It’s regular Roach,” Senior Parking Officer Vidal Garcia said. “The same old guy.”
Garcia was Rocha’s commanding officer for the two years Rocha served as an aide at CCC and said Rocha is a happy, joyful and dependable person.
Although he was on his way to becoming a police officer and would have enrolled in the police academy by now, Rocha is currently struggling to find his way.
“It’s definitely different,” he said. “Then, I had a goal. Now, I’m confused. I don’t know.”
Garcia said, “He was shaken up, but who wouldn’t be?”
Rocha said he is trying to figure out if he is coming to class for a reason or if he is just wasting his time.
“Right now, I’m waiting for something to inspire me,” he said.
Rocha is considering a career in social work. He said he is taking general education and psychology classes at CCC this semester and is working toward his associate degree in psychology.
“I think his career path has changed from law enforcement to social services,” Police Services Sgt. Jose Oliveira said. “(He can) have a direct impact on young men who do evil stuff — change their paths.”
Procedures examined
The shooting not only affected Rocha, but also the entire Contra Costa Community College District Police Services department as the Governing Board approved funding to buy bulletproof vests for all police aides shortly after the event.
“We were fortunate and he was fortunate (to have survived),” Police Services Chief Charles Gibson said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
Gibson said the districtwide police department had a major incident board of review that looked specifically at the shooting to see what went right and wrong.
In light of the shooting, Gibson and current police aide Oscar Mercado said communication has improved.
“I use the radio more and communicate more when I’m walking around the lower lots,” said Mercado, who was a first-semester aide and got a text message in class when Rocha was shot. “I let the dispatcher know where I’m at.”
Gibson said Police Services is working with outside agencies, as well as inside the department, to improve and enforce the importance of following proper procedures when on patrol.
He said an alarm can go off 10 times without incident, but the 11th time, when people have their guard down, something could go wrong, which is why Gibson said it is important to “battle complacency.”
“It was a tragic incident that happened,” he said. “(But) it brings people closer together. A lot of (police) aides came to help (Rocha) and had to grow up real quick.”
Two of the first police aides on the scene were Kenny Purizaga and Jaclyn Meeker.
Quick action
Meeker was in the Police Services Office on campus when she heard an officer screaming on the radio.
She said she heard, “Man down! Aide is down! Police aide is down!”
“The dispatcher came in. I didn’t know the locations so I told her I’d find out what was going on,” Meeker said.
She ran out of the office and saw Purizaga running toward Shane Drive on the east side of campus, and she followed.
Because it was just before 1 p.m. when the shooting happened, both morning and day shifts were on duty. Meeker was trying to figure out who had been shot, and when she saw the other two police aides, she knew immediately Rocha was the one shot.
“I started panicking,” Meeker said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I have to do.’”
Meeker and Purizaga, without knowing where the shooter was, if he still had a gun or if he would come back, got on both knees and starting giving first aid to Rocha.
“I unzipped his jacket, took his vest off and tossed it off to the side,” Meeker said.
Right afterward, a San Pablo patrol car came up and Meeker, Purizaga and the other aides put Rocha in the back so he could get to the hospital immediately. That action might have saved his life.
Rocha was taken to Doctors Medical Hospital in San Pablo, a five-minute drive away, before he was airlifted to John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.
As soon as Rocha was taken away, Meeker and the other police aides were told to tape off the crime scene as police from Richmond, San Pablo, El Cerrito, Contra Costa County Sheriff and Police Services conducted a search of the Hilltop-Fairmede area that went into the night.
She said that when they were sealing off the area, Purizaga picked up the vest Meeker had taken off Rocha, and she could see the blood and bullet hole through it.
“If (Officer Daniel Davies) didn’t put us to work right away, I would’ve lost it,” Meeker said.
A long search
The search of the area up Shane Drive toward Hilltop Mall came up empty.
Richmond Police Detective Eric Haupt had no leads until a woman filing an unrelated report came forward in March 2008.
The woman said she helped her boyfriend, Christon Parker, evade police the day of the shooting, Haupt said, by giving police misinformation of where she saw the shooting suspect run.
“She told officers at the scene the suspect ran through her backyard attempting to lead police from where he really was,” Haupt told The Advocate in March 2008.
It took police nearly a year after the shooting to finally locate and arrest Parker.
Haupt said Parker was arrested in Oakland on Oct. 8, 2008 by a number of police agencies, including Richmond Police and the FBI.
Parker, a 22-year-old three-striker from Richmond, was charged with attempted murder, felony possession of a firearm and attempted escape.
Deputy District Attorney Jaime Licht said Parker’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for May 26, where a judge will decide whether or not a crime was committed and if Parker committed the crimes.
Licht said testimony will be heard from the officers who were at the corner of Shane and Mills, as well as from Rocha himself, who said he is still shaken from time to time when people ask him about the shooting.
“It happened a long time ago,” he said. “My close friends know about it and don’t bother asking me, because everybody knows about it.
“(But) when it comes to other people, it startles me a little bit,” Rocha said.
He said that hopefully Parker will be found guilty and is put in jail a long time.
If that happens, Rocha said, “I accomplished something. I put someone away.”
Hospitalization
Due to potential complications from the gunshot wounds to his abdomen, Rocha spent two months in the hospital. Although several organs were hit, doctors at John Muir would not release him until Jan. 1, 2009, repairing and monitoring his pancreas.
“My stomach was patched up, my intestines as well,” Rocha said. “But my pancreas took two months.”
The pancreas produces most of the enzymes that digest food in the small intestine and produces the hormones that regulate blood sugar levels.
“(The doctors said) it was leaking acidic enzymes,” Rocha said. “The acid would tear away at my tissue and cause further complications.”
He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the hospital with family and friends, but the possibility remained in the back of his mind that the bullet that ended his career plans might also end his life.
“To this moment, I’m still in fear (of that),” he said.
The bile that leaked from his organs as a result of the shooting, however, caused gallstones to develop in Rocha’s body. Gallstones are caused by crystallization of cholesterol in the gallbladder that can plug the cystic duct and cause agonizing pain when the gallbladder or its ducts contract. But Rocha said he has not felt too much discomfort.
Doctors told Rocha he also might develop pancreatitis due to his injuries.
While Rocha was in the hospital, family, friends and co-workers from the college would visit and keep him company.
Gibson said that when he went to visit him, they would watch the Discovery Channel show “Man vs. Wild,” which the police chief found quite fitting considering the circumstances.
Although he is now out of the hospital and back at home in Richmond, Rocha still sees doctors on a regular basis.
“I’m going to the doctors non-stop,” he said. Rocha not only sees doctors for his gallstones, but also for the psychological trauma that still affects him.
“It’s annoying,” he said. “But I do what I’ve got to do.”
Contact Brett Abel at babel.advocate@gmail.com.
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