Five days before an off-duty CHP motorcycle officer hit and killed a pedestrian in Long Beach, he went to a hospital emergency room complaining of distorted vision in one eye, according to newly retrieved medical records.
Now-former Officer Alfredo Gutierrez’s medical condition was not known by prosecutors or jurors during his misdemeanor trial in May for the 2019 death of 24-year-old Cezannie Mount.
Gutierrez, who hit Mount while riding to work at 4:40 a.m., was charged with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter because he was traveling at nearly 70 mph in a 40-mph zone.The trial ended in a hung jury, and the Long Beach City Prosecutor’s Office announced it would not seek a retrial, partially to spare Mount’s family from another protracted proceeding.
Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert said his office would have introduced Gutierrez’s eye condition as evidence if prosecutors had known about it.
“It could have been highly relevant to our case because driving at high speeds in the dark is dangerous enough by itself, but having an eye condition, if that is true, could have convinced a jury that what he did was reckless,” Haubert said.
Partial emergency room records viewed by the Southern California News Group show Gutierrez was treated at UC Irvine Medical Center in the early hours of Oct. 22, 2019, for central serous chorioretinopathy, a condition that distorts vision because of a build-up of fluids beneath the retina.
Gutierrez had complained in the emergency room that a “halo pattern” was affecting the vision in his left eye, according to records written by Dr. Catherine Sheils.
“Patient says he was driving around 9 p.m. when he noticed a cloud over his central vision in the left eye,” said the emergency room report. “He states he is able to see through the cloud and the cloud only covers his central vision.”
In another medical visit about a month later, Gutierrez said the condition had persisted, records show.
Less than a week…
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