Re-trial begins for ex-LBUSD safety officer charged with murder of 18-year-old

A second trial is ramping up for the case of a former Long Beach school safety officer who fatally shot an 18-year-old in 2021.

A jury declared a deadlock in the first trial of Eddie Francisco Gonzalez, who is charged with the murder of Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez.

The jurors were split 7-5 in the first trial in April; with seven jurors convicting Gonzalez of second-degree murder and five convicting him of voluntary manslaughter while acquitting him of the murder charges.

Gonzalez has been free on bond while he waits for his second trial to begin. The pretrial took place on Aug. 13.

Gonzalez shot Rodriguez — a mother of an infant at the time — while she sat in the front passenger seat of a car her boyfriend was driving. The pair were driving with Rodriguez’s boyfriend’s younger brother in the backseat in a parking lot near the intersection of Spring Street and Palos Verdes Avenue, about a block from Millikan High School.

Mona Rodriguez, who was shot by a Long Beach Unified School District School Safety Officer, and her son. (Courtesy GoFundMe)

Rodriguez had gotten into a fight with a minor near the highschool, then got into the car to leave the area. The defendant’s attorney argued that his client acted in self-defense out of fear he was going to be run over by the car in which the woman was a passenger, according to City News Service.

Rodriguez was shot in the head and died of her gunshot wounds days later in the hospital. The Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) fired Gonzalez about a week after the shooting, and Gonzalez was charged with murder about a month later.

Research center The Violence Project studied the effect of having armed officers on school campuses during shootings and found no “significant reduction” in injuries in cases where an armed guard was on campus. The center found that schools with an armed guard ended with three times as many people killed during shootings.

LBUSD still employs armed School Safety Officers through the 2024-25 school year, according to an LBUSD spokesperson. The district said the officers are not stationed on campuses, but are “available to respond to school sites when necessary or upon the request of a school or administrative personnel.”

Rodriguez’s family announced in 2021 that they reached a $13 million settlement of their lawsuit against the school district in connection with Rodriguez’s death.

Oscar Rodriguez and another family member talk to the protestors outside the LBUSD headquarters building during a Board of Education meeting on Oct. 6, 2021. The family of Mona Rodriguez asked the board to fire the safety officer involved in the shooting and reform their safety protocols. He has since been fired. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune)

The lawsuit alleged that Gonzalez did not pass probation when he tried to be hired by the Los Alamitos and Sierra Madre police departments, but he was still hired by the LBUSD, which compounded matters by negligently training him.

A prosecutor told the jury during the April trial that Gonzalez tried to “play police officer” and made a series of bad decisions that led to the fatal shooting.

Deputy District Attorney Lee Orquiola said Gonzalez “responded to youthful disobedience with deadly force” and “unjustifiably” fired two shots at the vehicle after an altercation between Rodriguez and a teenage female Millikan High School student about a block from the school’s campus.

The prosecutor told jurors all that Gonzalez had to do that day was to get the vehicle’s license plate number and let “real police officers handle the situation,” but said he instead “escalated the situation with a series of bad decisions” and “unnecessarily fired two shots at the back of that fleeing vehicle,” according to a report of the trial from City News Service.