Tonika Reed
By Tonika Reed
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
“Who will guard the guards themselves?”
”Who watches the watchmen?”
“Who will protect us against the protectors?” asked Misha Charlton at an Oxnard City Council Meeting on April 26, 2015. Charlton’s sister Meagan Hockaday, a Santa Barbara native, was shot and killed by Oxnard Police officer Roger Garcia on March 28, 2015, in her Oxnard home.
Garcia was responding to a report of a verbal domestic dispute called in by Hockaday’s partner, Luis Morado. Within 20 seconds of entering the apartment, Garcia shot Hockaday multiple times in the presence of Morado and their three young daughters.
Garcia was placed on administrative leave, per custom, and has since returned to his job as an officer of the law— all while Meagan Hockaday is dead and her family is left to pick up the pieces of their former lives.
Charlton and Hockaday both grew up in Santa Barbara. Meagan attended Peabody Charter School where her kindergarten teacher read the class the story of Pollyanna. It became her favorite story and song, so much so that she arrived home that day and renamed herself Polly Wolly Doodle. This, and a variety of Polly and Doodle, stuck as a nickname between close family members, according to her obituary.
Hockaday and Charlton attended Santa Barbara Jr. High and Santa Barbara High School, “Home of the Dons” where they both were cheerleaders. Charlton was the Varsity squad captain and Hockaday the JV squad captain, making it the first time in Santa Barbara High’s history for two Black cheerleading captains.
“We did a lot of shit that inner-city kids don’t get to do,” said Charlton. They were both involved in numerous community activities, such as horse camp and Bible camp, and held local jobs and purchased cars early on.
Meagan Hockaday as a cheerleader for Santa Barbara High School (courtesy photo)
The sisters moved to Oxnard after their grandmother’s passing. They bought an apartment together and spent much of their time walking around and getting to know their new town. They both found boyfriends, had children, enjoyed life, and generally kept to themselves.
“Meagan was hella cool,” said Charlton. She describes her sister as a fun-loving person who loved being in front of the camera. She was a stay-at-home mother who enjoyed the crooning of Brenton Woods and the sensuous tunes of Selena.
“Even in the weeks before, she’d go to my mom’s house for dinner and old school music would always be playing, like Zapp and Roger, and we would dance and sing— and that’s just, like, who she was,” said Charlton. “She liked to have fun and enjoyed being around her [daughters] and family and she didn’t really have a lot of friends so that was like her outlet.”
Though Hockaday dealt with postpartum depression after the birth of her third child, Charlton said she loved her daughters with all of her heart and was their fiercest defender.
“She was really like, kind of shy in the outside world”, said Charlton. “She didn’t drive— she was a stay-at-home mom, and she just kind of kept her life to herself.”
Meagan Hockaday was just 26-years-old when she was killed.
A 27-page report on the incident by the Ventura County District Attorney’s (DA) office declared the killing of Hockaday a “justifiable homicide.” The reports stated the officer believed he was in “imminent threat of death or bodily injury.” Oxnard’s current Assistant Police Chief Jason Benites described the shooting as a quick escalation that left no opportunity for an alternative solution.
“I’ll be honest with you— in this case, everything happened so quickly that there wasn’t really a very explicit opportunity for them to engage in any kind of discussion with her that would lend toward de-escalation,” said Benites.
At the time of her death, Hockaday was a young mother who was in desperate need of help. According to Charlton, she was small in stature, 5’3” in height, and about 115-120 pounds. She was “a genuinely good person,” said Charlton.
Meagan Hockaday (courtesy photo)
In addition to having a tumultuous relationship with Morado, dealing with postpartum depression, and raising three children all under the age of 5, the DA report explained that Hockaday had suspicion to believe that Morado was a danger to their daughters— and Child Protective Services had investigated. No basis was found for those allegations.
The report is rife with details of the rocky relationship between Hockaday and Morado. It did not, however, describe Officer Garcia employing any type of de-escalation methods whatsoever. It details Officer Garcia as entering with his gun already drawn, and when Hockaday exited her kitchen with a “fixed-blade serrated kitchen knife,” he immediately and fatally shot her three times.
Hockaday’s family believes the incident was an act of excessive police force.
“The facts are that a man was allowed to enter somebody’s apartment, gun drawn, break policy, not announce himself, murder her in front of her children, and that’s that—within a 15-20 second time span,” said Charlton. “That’s it and that’s all. Everybody tries to take and derive all of these extra things from it, but that’s the facts of the matter.”
Charlton has fought for justice for her sister by attending marches, speaking at city council meetings, and more— though she noted that sometimes the fight for justice can feel circular and empty of true reform.
“When you’re angry and you’re in the heat of the moment and you’re in that passion— you feel like all of that marching is going to change something, but when you see it doesn’t— its real, real debilitating,” she said.
According to Mapping Police Violence by Stanford alum, Samuel Sinyangwe and DeRay McKesson; 598 people in the United States have been killed by the police this year at the time of publication.
Between 2013 and 2019, law enforcement in California killed 1,186 people. Black people are 3-4 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and they are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed in comparison to white people.
“Corruption exists,” said Charlton. “They kill people. They kill people. They kill people. Period. Point blank, period.”
A 2019 research article in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Science of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, “Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex” states that Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than white women.”
This study also notes, “among women and girls, black women’s and American Indian/Alaska Native women’s risk is highest.” They “expect between 2.4 and 5.4 black women and girls to be killed by police over the life course per 100,000 at current rates.”
Charlton wants people to realize that the police are not here to completely save the day. She said, “Open your eyes to the fact they are not these fucking superheroes you want them to be. They’re regular-ass people, with hella-ass problems that terrorize their communities. And yeah, it’s not all of them— but it’s some of them.”
While police stations have adopted the 8Can’tWait campaign that works to require de-escalation and exhausting all other options before shooting, Charlton explains she sees the adoption of these policies as “performative” and stands for police abolition.
The adoption of these eight policies is different at each station and each police department. When asked what type of change the campaign would have on the Oxnard Police Department, Assistant Chief Benites stated their department already addresses these topics with officers in training.
“We have things that address most of what the 8Can’tWait stands for. The one that we had some fundamental differences with was the use-of-force continuum that was among the 8,” he said.
He noted that there is also legislation moving forward such as AB1196 and SB230 which will work to change laws as we know them in relation to the 8Can’tWait campaign.
When asked what suggestions she would give people in need of help who are not comfortable speaking with or calling on a police officer in a time of need, Charlton explained that it depends on the situation.
“People want to call the police just because they have a grievance,” said Charlton. Though she noted, “If you are Black, that is not the number that you call.”
She suggested calling 211 in California which is a hotline created and maintained by the United Way Foundation. The number provides help with food insecurity, mental health resources, transportation help, and much more.
Mapping Police Violence notes that 99 percent of killings by police from 2013 to 2019 has not resulted in officers being charged with a crime. The tragic story of Meagan Hockaday is one of those killings. Officer Roger Garcia is on active duty at the Oxnard Police Department today.
According to Chief Benites, there has not been another fatal officer-involved shooting since the case of Hockaday in 2015. He stated, “It’s very good that nobody has been killed by an officer or police gunfire since that 2015 incident… I mean—that’s encouraging. We try to give our officers the best training that we can.”
Charlton says that even though Garcia is not a white police officer, the same systemic injustice of white supremacy is at play.
“I did not realize that the perception of Black people was still so bad, that the systemic racism was still so bad,” she said. “I did not know that until she died. Everything that I now know that I’ve figured out or been taught, or have learned has been because this happened to us.”
While Hockaday was killed in 2015, her story has gained more attention in the broader context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and recent protests against police brutality.
“One thing that I know for sure is that—my family member, and that is my love, my sister Meagan Hockaday—she is not the first, and she is not the only and she’s not the last,” said Charlton.
Meagan Hockaday’s family does not want her to be forgotten.
In a Bustle article titled, “The Lack of Mobilized Outrage For Police Killing Black Women Is An Injurious Erasure”, author Treva Lindsey outlines how the names of Black women who have suffered the same fate of Black men at the hands of police are more easily forgotten. This erasure of Black women and Black trans people notes a dubious sort of sexism at play, even in the face of Black death.
“Demanding we #SayHerName or asserting that #BlackTransLivesMatter doesn’t detract from grappling with police violence against cisgender Black men and boys — it expands how we think about the depths and perniciousness of anti-Black police violence,” Lindsey wrote.
Simone Ruskamp and Krystle Farmer Sieghart, former leaders of Healing Justice: Black Lives Matter Santa Barbara, reverberate the call to #SayHerName and remember those who have been killed unjustly in local communities. In a Santa Barbra Independent article, these leaders stress the importance and basis of their cause.
“We know how often Santa Barbara likes to congratulate itself,” said Ruskamp, “and so we wanted to remind our community that these harms do indeed happen here, and so we named the first Black resident, Jerry Forney, forced here as an enslaved person, and Meagan Hockaday, a former Santa Barbara High School cheerleader later killed by Oxnard police. This happens here.”
A Time article by Rutgers University professor and scholar Brittney Cooper, says the names of Breonna Taylor, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tanisha Anderson, Atatiana Jefferson, and Charleena Lyles and interrogates the question of why we seem to let the killings of Black women “recede from the foreground quietly”.
“Femininity is a weapon only if you’re white. Black women have no such protections,” wrote Cooper.
Charlton stated she will not let her sister ‘recede’. On August 27th she would have turned 32-years-old.
“No matter how selfishly—I will always scream my sister’s name first,” she said.
#MeaganHockaday #SayHerName #BlackLivesMatter
