As a San Marcos High School student, Cameron Ely played on the Royals football team. Cameron Ely, 30, the son of “Tarzan” star Ron Ely, was fatally shot Oct. 15, 2019 in Ron Ely’s home in Hope Ranch by Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies who said Cameron announced he had a gun and lunged forward. Deputies, who later discovered Cameron was unarmed, believed he was the prime suspect in his mother Valerie Ely’s death. Ron Ely and his daughters filed a suit in July 2020 against Santa Barbara County and the four sheriff’s deputies — Desiree Thome, Jeremy Rogers, Phillip Farley and John Gruttaduario. The suit is set to go to trial Feb. 22 in the federal District Court in Los Angeles. On Oct. 5, 2020, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office, which investigated the shooting, found it was a “justifiable homicide under Penal Code 196(2).”
Re: Robert Eringer’s Jan. 16 News-Press column, “Trial date approaches for suit over Cameron Ely’s death.”
I would like to thank Robert Eringer in last Sunday’s News-Press for doing a good job of making the Black Lives Matter arguments regarding the police’s excessive use of force. Except, this time the victim was an unarmed, privileged young white male in an upscale, mostly white neighborhood.
Black males are similarly victimized by police departments throughout the country on a regular basis.
Like BLM, Mr. Eringer is also calling for accountability and justice for the victims. It also sounds as if he wants a weeding out of bad cops, retraining of the police departments in general, and a funding of the police departments to include more sensitive, less lethal approaches in these tense situations; all BLM territory.
This crap can happen to anybody and certainly points up the need for the police departments in this country to take a hard, long look at themselves and make the needed reforms.
Russ Cross
Solvang
