Five hours after he was detained by San Antonio police, Mathias “Marty” Ometu appeared before a city magistrate at the Frank D. Wing building on Frio Street downtown.
Four hours later, he went through that same thing again — this time with a Bexar County magistrate at the county’s Justice Intake & Assessment Annex on Comal Street, about seven blocks away.
By that time, he had been in custody over 12 hours. It was the first opportunity he had to briefly speak to a lawyer.
He had to wait another 37 hours before getting a court-appointed attorney.
For many people arrested in Bexar County, the drawn-out, redundant magistration process is the norm.
Two weeks after Ometu was stopped by police while jogging and wrestled into a patrol vehicle after he refused to provide his name — as is his right — some criminal justice experts and reform activists say Ometu’s ordeal exemplifies the need for city and county officials to streamline the magistration process and reduce delays in getting attorneys appointed.
“It’s an extremely long process,” said Laquita Garcia, a community organizer with the Texas Organizing Project, a statewide advocacy group. “That’s one of the reasons why we want to bring the city and county together to improve the magistration process.”
The push to consolidate magistration — when a judge informs a defendant of the criminal complaint, sets bail and appoints a lawyer, if needed — has been the source of a long-standing feud between city and county officials.
That conflict culminated in November 2018, after the county opened its new Justice Intake & Assessment Annex, next to the jail.
The San Antonio Police Department, which accounts for 60 to 65 percent of arrests in the county, refused to move its magistration process to the annex, saying the way it was designed unnecessarily delayed officers’ return to patrols. It opted to stick with the city’s facility, which a county contractor once equated to a “third-world country.”
On ExpressNews.com: Bexar County opens justice center as part of criminal justice reform effort
In the past two years, the magistration process has been switched back and forth between city and county judges. Now, all people arrested by the San Antonio police are magistrated first at the Wing building, and again at the county annex, making the process more mazelike. All other arrestees go straight to the annex.
“The problem of people arrested by the San Antonio Police Department spending an indeterminate amount of time at the city magistrate facility has been ongoing,” said Michael Young, chief of the Bexar County Public Defender’s Office, who is involved in magistration hearings.
“Unfortunately, because of the fact that people arrested by SAPD are taken to the city magistrate facility first, and then the county facility, Mr. Ometu’s experience was very similar — if not the very same — as others who experience delays seeing a county magistrate.”
In Bexar County, it takes on average seven hours during a felony arrest before a magistration hearing is held at the Justice Intake & Assessment Annex, according to a recent study by the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University.
But some people familiar with the process caution those figures could be skewed by the double magistration — in other words, that arrests by the SAPD are making the time appear longer than it is.
Case in point, some said: Once Ometu arrived at the county facility at 1:25 a.m., it took a little over an hour before he was seen by a county magistrate judge. By that time, he had been in custody over 12 hours.
“Had SAPD brought him straight to the annex, they would have had him magistrated within an hour,” Young said.
City officials have defended their choice to stay put at the Wing building. City Manager Erik Walsh said Friday that the process, as it is now, is much more efficient than it once was.
At one point, when the city had an $18 million agreement with Bexar County to handle magistration for all arrests countywide, it could take up to 18 hours before a hearing was held. Walsh said it currently takes five or six hours.
On ExpressNews.com: County contracts with San Antonio to magistrate its inmates over district judges’ objections
County district court judges have said county magistrates, not city ones, have more expertise and jurisdiction to handle cases.
City officials have questioned why county judges need to be involved.
“A year ago, the city was doing magistration for both the county and the city,” Walsh said Friday. “I’m not a judge or a lawyer, but my understanding is that once people are magistrated, they don’t need to be remagistrated. All judges are authorized through state law.”
Moving forward, Walsh said the city is considering more permanent solutions. The Wing building is in the footprint for the University of Texas at San Antonio’s downtown campus expansion — meaning the city likely will have to relocate at some point.
He said the city hasn’t completely ruled out partnering with the county, but that it was considering alternatives first, including the possibility of adding holding cells in SAPD substations, where magistration could be handled virtually.
“Everything that drives what we do is officer time,” Walsh said. “An officer having to drive downtown and take the time to process an individual at the annex is not a good use of officer time. We’re able to get officers back into service sooner.”
Detained during jog
Ometu, an insurance agent at USAA, was stopped by police about 1:50 p.m. Aug. 25 while jogging on Woodstone Drive near the Interstate 10 access road during his lunch break.
Officers Richard Serna and Devin Day said they stopped Ometu, who is Black, because he matched the description of a man suspected in the choking and punching of a woman at a nearby apartment complex.
The two officers — who each have less than two years on the force — repeatedly asked Ometu for his name, which he declined to provide, according to a video taken by an officer’s body-worn camera. Later, Ometu would say he didn’t provide his name at the time because he thought he was being unfairly targeted.
The officers placed Ometu in handcuffs. They continued to detain him — even after the woman told officers over the phone that her ex-husband was wearing a green shirt the color of grass and black basketball shorts. She said he had a short, scruffy beard.
Ometu’s T-shirt was neon green and his basketball shorts were white. His beard is full and several inches long.
On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio police wrestled a Black man into a squad car and took him to jail. He wasn’t the suspect they were searching for.
About 30 minutes after Ometu was detained, Serna said he would take Ometu to the woman’s apartment to determine whether he was the suspect. Several times, Ometu refused.
A struggle ensued after the officers tried to get Ometu into the patrol car. At one point, Ometu can be heard repeatedly screaming, “You’re choking me.” Each time, the officers said they weren’t.
Afterward, the officers wrote that Ometu had kicked both of them — including one blow to the face. According to the video, Serna said he was unsure whether he was harmed in any way.
“I guess I got kicked in my right leg,” he said at one point.
Shortly after, the family violence victim arrived at the scene. She told police Ometu was not the man who assaulted her.
Still, the officers didn’t believe her.
“I don’t know if she’s just saying that’s not him,” Serna said. “He matches the description.”
“It’s possible that you’ll go down to get him ID’d and it’ll turn out he is the guy,” another officer said. “That whole cycle of violence thing.”
Mazelike system
About 3:30 p.m., the officers took Ometu to the Frank D. Wing Municipal Court for “identification purposes.”
Once there, they realized that Ometu couldn’t be identified using the databases available at the city facility. They took him to the county intake annex.
About three hours later, after being identified, Ometu was transported back to the Wing building. Four more hours had gone by when he appeared before a city judge for a preliminary hearing to hear the charges he faced.
No attorney represented Ometu at the city hearing, officials said. The Public Defender’s Office — which at one point had lawyers present during city preliminary hearings — no longer has staff at the city facility, due in part to staffing shortages, Young said.
Ometu was charged with two felony counts of assaulting a police officer. (Days later, after a bystander video of the incident went viral, Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales sought to dismiss the charges, and both officers concurred. A judge agreed.)
On ExpressNews.com: Charges dismissed against Black jogger; San Antonio police chief says officers ‘acted appropriately’ in detaining him
About 12:40 a.m., officers transported Ometu to the county intake annex for the second time. It was there, nearly 12 hours after being stopped by police, Ometu briefly spoke to a public defender.
During the hearing before the county magistrate, Ometu asked for a court-appointed attorney. The judge set his bail at $20,000.
Jeff Mellow, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, questioned the need for double magistration, which lengthens an already complex process that’s difficult for defendants to navigate.
Ometu later would describe the humiliation of being strip-searched at the jail and the hopelessness of being trapped behind metal bars.
“I experienced true darkness during this period of isolation. … Thousands of thoughts flew into my head, each gaining momentum of completely breaking me,” he said.
Studies show that even a brief stay in jail can have a range of effects on a person’s health and psychological well-being.
“There’s this heightened fear of being victimized,” Mellow said, noting the experience can vary from jail to jail. “Likewise, for those that are employed, they fear losing their jobs or losing wages. They fear the stigmatization of having to tell their employer that they were locked up.”
He added, “All of those factors can and will increase depression and distress among some of those who are detained.”
Attorney delay
With his cellphone taken from him, Ometu was unable to remember any numbers for family or friends or get in contact with an attorney. At one point, he resigned himself to spending over a month in jail until his next scheduled court hearing.
According to three officials familiar with the process, arrestees taken to the Wing building have limited access to phones while in custody because police officers place their belongings in SAPD’s property room.
At the county intake facility, officials said, arrestees are allowed access to their phones to look up phone numbers. But by that point, it’s too late for SAPD arrestees, whose phones already are locked up.
“In today’s age, who remembers phone numbers?” asked Young of the Public Defender’s Office. “That’s an issue we’ve tried to address. We often can help facilitate a way for individuals to contact family or friends.”
On ExpressNews.com: Mathias Ometu, Black jogger arrested by San Antonio police, describes emotional two days in jail
On Aug. 27, two days after Ometu was arrested, online court records showed Rudolph Monsalvo, a local attorney who died in 2011, was appointed to represent Ometu.
The San Antonio Express-News reported that information the next day, which caught the attention of some elected officials.
Ana Amici, general administrative counsel for the Criminal District Courts, disputed the newspaper’s reporting, saying Monsalvo never was appointed to represent Ometu.
On Thursday, Monica Ramos, a spokeswoman for Bexar County, acknowledged Monsalvo’s name had appeared online. She said it was a coding error. The number assigned to Ometu’s case had been used multiple times in the past, court records show, most recently in 1998. Monsalvo was the listed attorney in that case.
According to Ramos, the county’s computer system pulled data from the new and old cases, leading to the error.
The county’s Information Technology Department does not think that error has occurred before. Officials said they are correcting the coding to prevent a similar error.
In the end, it took 37 hours after Ometu asked for a court-appointed attorney for San Antonio lawyer Adam Kobs to be assigned to his case.
That’s far quicker than for most. The Texas A&M study shows it takes five days on average between a defendant’s request for an attorney and the assignment of counsel.
(Researchers said that figure could be slightly off because Bexar County’s data management system, which was implemented in the 1980s, does not record the exact date of the request.)
On ExpressNews.com: Bexar County to implement system to manage counsel appointments for indigents
Precinct 2 Commissioner Justin Rodriguez, a longtime advocate for criminal justice reform, was startled by the five-day average.
“We all want to make sure people have access to an efficient and equal process — that starts with magistration and access to a court-appointed attorney,” Rodriguez said. “Perhaps this study will help us get there faster with some of the suggested changes.”
Bexar County Administrative District Judge Ron Rangel cautioned against rushing to judgment, saying a number of factors could contribute to the average.
“The justice system is never black or white,” Rangel said. “There’s never an easy answer in the justice system because it’s made of humans. There’s a million factors that could be considered when you see these statistics.”
Still, Rangel acknowledged the need for changes.
52 hours in custody:
Aug. 25:
1:53 p.m.: Officer Richard Serna arrives at the scene where officer Devin Day had stopped Mathias Ometu.
1:54 p.m.: Serna places Ometu in handcuffs.
2:18 p.m.: Serna and Day wrestle Ometu into a patrol vehicle.
3:30 p.m.: Officers indicate they are getting ready to take Ometu to the Frank D. Wing Municipal Court on Frio Street for “identification” purposes.
4:09 p.m.: Officers and Ometu arrive at the city court.
4:12 p.m.: Officers are unable to identify Ometu. He is transferred to the Bexar County Justice Intake and Assessment Annex to be identified.
7:39 p.m.: Officers transport Ometu back to the Wing building.
11:05 p.m.: Ometu appears before a city judge for a preliminary hearing. No public defender is present.
Aug. 26:
12:37 a.m.: Ometu is transported to the Justice Intake & Assessment Annex again.
1:25 a.m.: Ometu arrives at the county facility.
2:36 a.m.: Ometu appears before a county judge. A public defender is present. Ometu asks for a court-appointed attorney.
Aug. 27:
1:45 p.m.: A San Antonio Express-News reporter notices lawyer Rudolph Monsalvo’s name in online court records about Ometu.
2:01 p.m.: Reporter leaves a voicemail with officials in the Central Magistrate Division inquiring about Monsalvo, who died in 2011.
2:24 p.m.: Reporter sends an email to officials in Bexar County’s Public Information Office and Criminal Justice Office inquiring about Monsalvo.
4:16 p.m.: Attorney Adam Kobs is appointed to represent Ometu.
6 to 6:30 p.m.: Ometu is released from jail.
“Bexar County has been called a leader in criminal justice reform in several respects,” Rangel said. “It doesn’t mean we have met or obtained our goals. It just means we are taking the study to further our goals, and further push the envelope.”
Last hurdle
Ometu finally was released from jail between 6 and 6:30 p.m. Aug. 27. He said the joy of seeing his friends outside the jail was one of “the greatest feelings in the world.”
But his ordeal wasn’t over.
He still didn’t have his cellphone, which was in the SAPD’s property room. For several days, he went without it.
To get it back, he had to pay SAPD’s standard fee. The price: $25.
Emilie Eaton is a criminal justice reporter in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Emilie, become a subscriber. eeaton@express-news.net | Twitter: @emilieeaton
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