Fernando Villanueva-Galvez still hasn’t fully recovered from the police dog attack on Oct. 21, 2023, according to his Oakland attorney, Angel Alexander, whose law firm got the video from the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office.
She sued San Jose police on her client’s behalf last month.
The video shows officers sending in the dog, named Ronin, to search Villanueva-Galvez’s apartment on Northrup Street where the then 19-year-old is heard screaming in pain from the back room. Ronin’s handler, Officer Eliseo Anaya, calls off the dog five times, but the animal doesn’t heed the orders, the video shows.
Eventually, the officers move in closer to where Villanueva-Galvaz is in the hallway of his apartment. His face was streaming with blood. A chunk of his ear had been bitten off.
“His injuries were so horrific,” Alexander told KTVU. “Police dogs are not supposed to behave that way. They’re not supposed to attack your face.”
The San Jose police declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The city attorney’s office did not immediately respond for comment.
However, in police reports obtained by KTVU, Anaya wrote that he sent the dog in because Villanueva-Galvez had just stabbed someone and wouldn’t comply with orders to come out of his apartment.
In court documents in prior K-9 cases against the SJPD, city attorneys have argued that the officers’ actions were reasonable.
Anaya is the same officer who was cleared by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office in 2019 for the deadly shooting of 24-year-old Jennifer Vasquez, whom they mistakenly identified as an armed felon and chased until she crashed her car into a chain link fence.
A two-month KTVU investigation analyzing K-9 bite data among the Bay Area’s 25 largest police departments revealed major discrepancies between agencies.
Some departments routinely deploy police dogs to bite suspects, while other similar-sized departments virtually never use them.
The investigation found San Jose police led the pack with 167 bites over a five-year period from 2015 to 2020.
Richmond police had the second most bites – 84 in the same time period.
And in Antioch, a smaller city with fewer than 100 officers, police dogs bit people 49 times in just three years.
