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Defense attorneys for three former San Antonio Police Department officers charged with murder and aggravated assault over a 2023 on-duty shooting accused prosecutors with the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office of withholding critical information during a court hearing on Tuesday.
Two of the former officers, Eleazar Alejandro and Alfred Flores, are charged with murder for the shooting and killing of Melissa Perez, a woman with schizophrenia who had an apparent mental health crisis in her home when officers shot her in June 2023. A third former officer, Nathaniel Villalobos, is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon by a public servant.
The shooting sparked outcry and led to the rapid firing and arrest of the three men. SAPD Chief William McManus criticized their actions and said they had not made efforts to de-escalate the incident with Perez.
The rapid arrest of the three men — the warrant was obtained within 16 hours of the shooting — was central to Tuesday’s hearing. Their defense attorneys said they had reason to believe the initial warrant was obtained improperly, and they claimed the District Attorney’s Office has stalled the defense’s efforts to acquire information related to that warrant for nearly two years.
“This email request has been almost two years pending, and it's clear from the tenor of the email that what we're asking for is all evidence that would prove that there was a rush to judgment,” Alejandro’s attorney Ben Sifuentes said.
Sifuentes said the necessary SAPD staff could not have fully reviewed footage of the shooting given how quickly the warrant was obtained.
He told Judge Ron Rangel that the defense wished to share information with him under seal — kept from the prosecution — that would demonstrate why accessing the information he claimed the DA’s office was withholding was so important to the defense’s case.
“I have discussed this with my co-counsels, and they have asked that I not discuss our defensive theories to justify our reasons for requesting this, and that instead we submit a memo of documents under sealed ex parte, so that our defense strategy is not disclosed,” Sifuentes said.
He said if the DA’s office is found to not have documents that he claimed they are required to have, that could be considered official misconduct by the Texas attorney general’s office, which could result in the removal of District Attorney Joe Gonzales.
Some of the documents the defense team is requesting are “user audit trails” for several SAPD officials at the top of the department’s chain of command, including McManus, then-Assistant Chief Karen Falks, Capt. Russ Van Geffen, and others. These reports would show whether and for how long these officials viewed footage from the shooting.
Sifuentes said they believe the user audit trails will show that none of those officials actually viewed the videos — or at least not in their entirety — before signing off on getting a warrant.
He also said the defense believed a signed affidavit that supported the warrant contained false representations.
“Now either they're false because they're intentionally false, or they're false because of a material emission,” Sifuentes said.
The DA Office’s Criminal Trial Chief David Lunan said the user audit trails would not necessarily prove what Sifuentes suggested since multiple people could have watched the footage on a single computer, for example, and that the DA’s office had already turned over everything it was legally required to. He also called the defense’s request to share information with the judge under seal “unprecedented” and “unfair.”
“We have presented copies of this [request] to the San Antonio Police Department, which is the submitting agency, the law enforcement agency that submitted this case to our office, and they have told us that none of these items [the defense] asked for, none of the materials they asked for, exist,” Lunan said.
As to alleged false representations in the affidavit that underlies the original warrant, Lunan said the defense has ways to prove that.
“If there was any evidence of taint — what they claim to be a fraudulent affidavit — they have mechanisms to expose that by filing a motion to suppress, putting on evidence or responding to evidence … there have been no motions to suppress,” he said.
Rangel ultimately said the defense could share the information they had under seal, so they didn’t have to expose their defense strategy to the prosecution but made no commitment to take any further action.
