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Son Rallies for Mom Killed by Cop

By Marian Caballo

Spectrum staff

The first time he heard a protester shout his murdered mother’s name, Andrew Ocasio broke down. “I was balling, with tears. It really hit me that day,” he said, remembering what happened after he spoke at a June Black Lives Matter rally.

He’d started showing up at those rallies to stand with others outraged over George Floyd’s highly publicized slaying by a Minneapolis police officer.  He knew he had to speak out more forcefully and publicly about what happened to his mother.  She is among women and girls slain by police whose cases are not as famous.

“Every time I share her story, I know that she’s there with me,” Ocasio, a 26-year-old carpenter, told The Spectrum.  “I hope that her story can bring some change in the world.”

In October 2017, an upstate New York police officer gunned down his mother, Sandy Guardiola, a corrections officer who became a social worker and then a parole officer, in her Canandaigua home. Some former co-workers had sent him there to do a wellness check, after she didn’t show up for work. He fired three bullets into her body. She was in her bedroom. She was 48 years old.

From the podium, he has spoken about her and what he’s doing on her behalf at rallies upstate and downstate, including in Naples, Farmingdale, Smithtown and Middle Village and at New York City Hall.

“I was invited to this conference of families — survivors, we call each other, survivors of police brutality,” said Ocasio, whose father and several cousins also had police careers.  “And just, hearing all the stories it is so … ”

He paused.

Then, from his end of the telephone: “It’s disgusting how minorities in this country are treated. There are thousands and thousands of stories that we don’t even know, and that’s scary.”

If his mother had been white, she would not have been shot dead in her bedroom, he insisted. She had been injured in a car wreck and spent some time on medical leave. She was preparing to return to work but at a different office than the one from which her, by then, former co-workers requested a wellness check, thinking she hadn’t shown up for work at all.

Police have said the officer walked into her home and talked with Guardiola, who drew and shot the weapon she was licensed to carry as a probation officer. There is no body cam footage. Her family’s own, private investigation contradicts the official police account, arguing, instead, that her weapon fired accidentally and not in the officer’s direction.

Her family is suing in civil court for $50 million. The case has not been settled.

While he waits, Ocasio, one of Guardiola’s two children, is pursuing other ways of getting justice for his mom. The Change.org petition that he started two months ago, by late July, had garnered over 79,000 signatures.

“Hearing Sandy’s story fueled the fire in me to fight even harder for justice for everyone,” Katrina Colletti, organizer of the Middle Village vigil where Ocasio spoke in July, wrote The Spectrum in an Instagram message.

At his first protest in Farmingdale, his Long Island hometown, Ocasio was shocked to see how few people knew about his mother’s story. When he asked, 20 people in that big crowd raised their hands. “It could’ve ended at Farmingdale, but it was kind of like … ”

He paused. “More people need to hear,” he said, more people need to hear.”

In addition to winning justice for his mother, Ocasio is hoping that people will be less hostile toward each other in a time when hostilities and divisions are high.

“When they’re divided between the cops and there’s two sides, it’s just screaming and shouting, and there’s no real engagement,” said Ocasio, who stays in touch with Emerald Garner, whose father, Eric Garner, also was killed by police. “People just need to listen to each other and talk, and discuss things.”

Ocasio also hopes for a special investigation of his mother’s murder, conducted by a special state investigator. He also wants to shed light on police wellness checks that have gone the wrong way; to persuade law enforcement officials and lawmakers to mandate body cams whenever police make those checks. He wants the way that wellness checks are done to be totally overhauled.

“I need to stay focused,” he said, “keep fighting for her.”