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A former Philadelphia police officer was sentenced to at least eight years in prison for fatally shooting a 12-year-old boy in the back in 2022.
Edsaul Mendoza, 28, pleaded guilty in April to third-degree murder in the shooting of Thomas “TJ” Siderio. He was the youngest person ever fatally shot by a Philadelphia police officer, and Mendoza’s sentence marks the first time an officer in the city was charged with murder for an on-duty shooting.
On March 1, 2022, the youth fired on a group of officers in an unmarked police car who were investigating a stolen firearm case, then fled. Mendoza pursued the child, who had dropped his weapon, then shot him in the back as he lay facedown on the ground, according to prosecutors.
“I wish you had reacted differently, because what you did was wrong,” Common Pleas Court Judge Diana Anhalt said during sentencing, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
“It’s hard,” his mother, Desirae Frame, told the paper after the sentencing. “I still don’t really believe it.”
Prosecutors said surveillance video contradicted the former officer’s statements about the shooting, including that Mendoza said Siderio pointed a gun at him, and that he was standing in the street when he fired on the youth, versus standing near him on the sidewalk.
Mendoza, a five-year veteran, was fired shortly after the shooting, for what Philadelphia police was a violation of their use of force protocol.
In court, he said, “The remorse of my actions is in me every single day.”
After the shooting, Mendoza searched for plane tickets to other countries, and looked online for nations without an extradition treaty to the US, according to prosecutors.
“Edsaul Mendoza got every benefit of the criminal justice system that he deprived TJ Siderio of by shooting TJ in the back," prosecutor Clarke Beljean said at a media briefing this week.
