Father Questions Deputy’s Version of Son’s Killing

The 29-year-old man shot and killed by an Orange County sheriff’s deputy this week was no angel, his family said Tuesday, but that was not justification for his death, they said as they struggled to make sense of their loss.

“They shot him down for no reason,” Tom Eamello said Tuesday of his son, Wayne T. Eamello. “My son has never, ever hurt anybody in his life, never hit anybody, never hurt anybody, and all of a sudden they put four shots in his body.”

Officials said the younger Eamello had been convicted of arson, possession of a disguised firearm and several misdemeanors, and had been out of jail for six weeks and living with his family in Anaheim.

Sheriff’s officials said a deputy shot in self-defense after Eamello lunged at him with a hunting knife.

The confrontation began shortly after noon Monday when Deputy Guy Pepe, a 13-year department employee assigned to the Orange County Transportation Authority, tried to cite Eamello for trespassing on the tracks and was threatened with a knife, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said.

“It’s a minor, minor citation,” Amormino said. “When you make contact with a suspect in the field and they pull a knife on you, number one, that’s against the law.”

Eamello turned and ran over a block wall and into a housing development, Amormino said. There, after an exchange of words, Pepe shot Eamello several times in the chest. Eamello was pronounced dead at West Anaheim Medical Center.

An Orange County district attorney’s task force that specializes in officer-involved shootings is investigating the incident.

But Eamello’s father and other relatives have many questions and few answers about the incident, which they said happened shortly after the young man left home on foot to look for a job.

A grieving Tom Eamello remembered his son as a good man trying to straighten out his life.

Tom Eamello, a manager in Buena Park for the U.S. Postal Service, said he has not been given a clear explanation of the shooting.

“Why did he have to die?” he asked. “Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg? I will never rest until I find out what really happened. I know my son. For him to take a knife out and go against a cop, that’s absurd. I just think this cop acted irrationally, and I want him to answer to that.”