Sheriff’s official: Driver who tore through Yorba Linda crowd could have ‘completely avoided all those people’

The driver of a car that struck and seriously injured a man and woman in a Yorba Linda parking lot during a heated demonstration “could have chosen an alternate route that would have completely avoided all those people,” a sheriff’s sergeant said Sunday.

Tatiana Turner, 40, of Long Beach, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder after the incident Saturday. She was attending the protest with Caravan for Justice, said Orange County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Carrie Braun. The organization is in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

The Caravan group, which planned Saturday’s event, describes itself as campaigning against police violence. They were met Saturday by counter-demonstrators carrying American flags as well as campaign banners supporting the re-election of President Donald Trump.

“The victims, from what we can tell, it appears that they were part of the Trump supporters,”  Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Breckner said.

“She chose that route” to leave the event, he said of Turner. “It wasn’t like that was her only avenue of escape, and she didn’t have to leave at that moment; she could have just stayed in her car.”

He added, “From what we can tell, there seemed to be no issues when she was getting into her car.”

The injured people included a man with two broken legs and a woman with major to moderate injuries all over her body, he said.

“She was just completely run over,” Breckner said of the victim. In a video of the incident, he said, “You can see the car kind of bounces around a little bit, because it’s going over that lady.”

The two victims were not identified.

Sheriff’s deputies estimated a total of 250 people for all demonstrators at the Saturday afternoon event.

Both sides initially were on either side of Imperial Highway at the intersection of Yorba Linda Boulevard in the  eastern Orange County city, but the counter-demonstrators at one point surged across the six-lane highway to confront the Caravan group, with face-to-face shouting matches of “Black lives matter” and “U.S.A.”

As the conflict grew more heated, with reports that some people had weapons, sheriff’s officials declared an unlawful assembly and ordered all protesters to disperse. It was shortly after that when the white sedan ran into a group of people in the parking lot of the Yorba Linda library.

People chased the car, which stopped a few hundred yards away from the scene of the incident and was surrounded by sheriff’s deputies.

The car had a shattered rear window with a flagpole sticking out of it. The windshield also was damaged.

At least one protester pepper-sprayed another one, Braun said, and an Anaheim man, Jason Mancuso, 46, was arrested on suspicion of failing to obey the dispersal order.

There have been previous gatherings of protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and counter-demonstrators with pro-Trump banners at the same intersection on Imperial Highway.

Caravan for Justice had plans for the Saturday demonstration as early as Sept. 17, but it coincidentally came three days after a deputy shot and killed a homeless Black man in San Clemente. Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes released a grainy video he said showed the man was reaching for a deputy’s gun.

The San Clemente city council imposed a curfew on Thursday night, but a protest against police brutality in the wake of the shooting broke up an hour before the 9 p.m. deadline.

No violence was reported that night.

It also was planned before the Sept. 23 announcement in Kentucky that a grand jury did not seek criminal charges against police officers for Breonna Taylor’s death, but instead indicted a fired Louisville officer on three counts of wanton endangerment for shooting into a home next to Taylor’s.

That announcement sparked demonstrations across the nation, several with violent incidents, including cars being driven into demonstrators.

On Friday a suspect reportedly drove a vehicle into a crowd of racial injustice protesters near the campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. No one was hurt.

A 25-year-old woman accused of striking a bicyclist with a pickup truck during a protest against racial injustice in downtown Buffalo N.Y. was charged Friday.

On Thursday night, someone was struck by an SUV speeding by a crowd of demonstrators in Hollywood on the second night of protests related to the Taylor grand jury announcement.

In the Taylor case, police had used a “no-knock” warrant to enter the 26-year-old woman’s apartment. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were roused from bed by police, and Walker said he fired once at the officers, thinking they were intruders. Investigators say police were returning fire when they shot Taylor several times. No drugs were found at her home.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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