A Guatemalan farmworker has been cleared of charges in the heart-attack death of a Florida sheriff’s officer, a case that drew celebrity attention and prompted a nationwide petition for his freedom.
NBC News reported on the case of 19-year-old Virgilio Aguilar Mendez, in December, after his attorney obtained and shared body camera video of the arrest.
On Friday, the state attorney in Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit said in a statement that dismissing charges against Aguilar Mendez was appropriate.
Expert testimony on Aguilar Mendez’s inability to comprehend English, his cultural background and concerns about his intellectual capacity had raised concerns in the case, said R.J. Larizza, the prosecutor in the case. He added that a judge recently ruled that Aguilar Mendez was incompetent to face prosecution based on that expert testimony.
“Arrest and time served is sufficient,” the state’s attorney stated.
Aguilar Mendez had been held since May 19, 2023, when he was arrested outside a Super 8 hotel in St. Augustine, Florida.
He was charged with contributing to the death of St. Johns County Sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Kunovich, who suffered a heart attack after struggling for several minutes, along with other officers, to take Aguilar Mendez into custody. Kunovich walked away when Aguilar Mendez was handcuffed on the ground. Minutes later he collapsed on a curb, according to documents released after the arrest.
Video of the arrest, however, led Aguilar Mendez’s civil attorney, Phillip Arroyo, to assert that his client was a victim of police brutality and that the arrest never should have happened. Arroyo said body camera showed that his client, whose first language is Mam, an indigenous language of Guatemala, did not understand the commands of the officer.
A petition for his release started by Change.org garnered more than 600,000 signatures. Aguilar Mendez’s case got a boost from media personality Kim Kardashian’s social media sites, Arroyo said.
Aguilar Mendez…
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