Long Beach will pay $550,000 to a man who was shot by a scandal-plagued LBPD officer and then sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence based on the officer’s now-compromised testimony.
The agreement, approved by the Long Beach City Council on Oct. 21, settles a federal civil rights lawsuit that 37-year-old Miguel Vargas filed in July 2023, alleging officers used excessive force when they shot him from behind.
Vargas and his attorney, David McLane, decided to settle the lawsuit because “this is a case that could have gone either way” if it landed in front of a jury, McLane said.
Howard Russell, principal deputy city attorney, said the settlement “was a fair and reasonable way to resolve the matter without the time, expense, and uncertainty of taking the case to trial.”
The settlement brings an end to a 15-year ordeal for Vargas that was deeply intertwined with broader questions about the credibility of Long Beach police and standards for honesty from officers.
Vargas was shot in October 2010 while two police officers chased him down a Central Long Beach alley. The officers were responding to a call about a woman with a gun at a party and started chasing Vargas when they spotted him bolting from the scene, according to police reports reviewed by the Long Beach Post.
Vargas was carrying a handgun, and, in his telling, tossed the gun onto the front lawn of a home as he ran by.
In the police version, the two officers claim they saw the gun still in Vargas’ hand and he was turning the gun toward them when they fired at him four times.
Photos and a diagram from that night show Vargas’ gun was found roughly 20 feet from where Vargas was ultimately shot.
One of the bullets that struck Vargas that night remained in his back for years until he had surgery to remove it, according to the lawsuit. That bullet, fired by Officer Dedier Reyes, “made it difficult for him to sleep and caused him to live in constant pain,” the lawsuit claimed.
Based on Reyes’ testimony, Vargas was convicted of assault on a police officer and being a felon in possession of a firearm, for which he was sentenced to 39 years in prison.
Vargas had served more than a decade of his sentence when questions about Reyes’ credibility erupted into the public eye.
Reyes was charged in 2021 with lying on a police report and perjury by then-District Attorney George Gascón, who alleged Reyes lied about which man he saw with a satchel outside a Long Beach taqueria, resulting in the wrong person being arrested for possession of a gun inside the satchel.
Reyes was eventually acquitted of the charge, saying it was an honest mistake, not a lie, but it cast doubt on Reyes’ prior arrests and the convictions tied to them.
As a result, Vargas was resentenced and allowed to walk free from prison in 2022 instead of serving out the rest of the 39 years.
Matthew Kaestner, who filed the petition for Vargas to be released, said if the officers who shot him “had just been honest,” Vargas likely would have been sentenced to 3 or 4 years for having a gun he was not legally allowed to have.
Instead, Kaestner alleged, the officers decided they were going to “cover [their] tracks by throwing him under the bus,” instead of facing tough questions about why they would shoot an unarmed man running from them. Kaesnter described Reyes as a problem officer on the LBPD force, saying he had racked up an excessive number of complaints during his career.
Reyes was at the center of another lawsuit filed in 2019 by Christopher Williams, a bus driver from Lomita, who alleged that Reyes twisted his arm and fractured his right elbow while handcuffing him outside a Pine Avenue bar.
That lawsuit resulted in a $499,800 settlement and put Reyes’ history of complaints on public display in court filings.
During 10 years on the force, departmental records show, Reyes developed a pattern of using physical force — at least 25 times — and amassed 20 complaints from citizens. Police supervisors backed Reyes in nearly all those cases, but he was suspended twice, once for disobeying a direct order from his sergeant and once for pushing a woman.
In the wake of the purjery and false report charges, Long Beach fired Reyes in 2022. Reyes’ attorney, Benjamin Karabian, argued that Reyes’ firing was politically motivated and only happened because then-LBPD Chief Robert Luna was preparing a run for LA County Sheriff on a police-reform platform. Indeed, records show the LBPD allowed Reyes to stay on the force and on patrol for years before Gascón announced the criminal charges.
Following Reyes’ acquittal, a city employment panel ruled that the LBPD had to rehire him. The city has appealed that decision to a judge, according to City Attorney Dawn McIntosh.
Kaestner, a criminal defense lawyer with 30 years of experience in Long Beach, was skeptical that Reyes would ever be rehired.
“He’s cost [the city] a million in civil judgements, but to get rid of him, they may have to pay him more,” Kaestner said.
As for Vargas, since his release from prison, he has been working full-time and recently had his first child, according to his attorney McLane. The settlement will let Vargas “move forward with his life,” McLane said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to show the city appealed its employment panel’s decision. It’s also been corrected to show that Reyes did not report seeing a man with a gun outside a taqueria, but rather that he saw a man with a satchel that officers eventually discovered had a gun inside.