Vanessa Marquez: The Deadly Link Between Police and the Disabled
On the sunny day of August 30, 2018, two police officers broke into an apartment in the small, idyllic community of South Pasadena, California. An hour and a half later, a dozen shots rang out. An unarmed woman, once a successful actress, collapsed on the stairs.
Her name was Vanessa Marquez, and she was 49 years old.
“Vanessa’s case intersects in so many areas,” said Marquez’s close friend, Minerva Garcia, at a South Pasadena rally commemorating Marquez’s death in August. “Lack of rental protections…lack of social services…disabled people being thrown away in this society.”
Two decades earlier, Marquez had been at the top of her career. A Latina actress in an industry where few Hispanic actors achieved success, Marquez was a shining star. After a breakout role in the film Stand and Deliver (1988), her cherub face graced the television screens of millions through hit shows like Seinfeld and ER.
But in the early 2000s, Marquez’s career ground to a mysterious halt. It wasn’t until 2017 that Marquez revealed the dark side to her popular role alongside George Clooney in ER.
“Clooney helped blacklist me when I spoke up [about] harassment,” she said in a tweet. “‘Women who dont play the game lose [their] career.’ I did.”
While Clooney denied he had any control over Marquez’s career, Garcia corroborated her story of harassment. At the rally, Garcia claimed that Marquez experienced sexual and racial harassment while working on the show, including a sexual assault on the set. Marquez filed a complaint against the producers and actors of ER, but was apparently unsuccessful.
“They proved too much, too powerful,” Garcia said. “She was blacklisted.”
What followed was a decline not only in the actress’s career, but in her health as well.
By the mid-2010s, Marquez was disabled. With diagnoses of celiac disease, fibromyalgia and osteoporosis, she had difficulties moving and was mostly confined to her South Pasadena apartment. Near the time of her death, she weighed 84 pounds, according to Garcia. Seizures were a frequent occurrence, and the rising medical bills put Marquez in dire financial circumstances.
“The medical debt was insurmountable,” Garcia said. “Her economic situation…the landlord didn’t want her there.”
This came to a head on August 30, 2018, when Marquez’s landlord allowed police officers to enter her apartment for a welfare check. According to the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office and bodycam footage released by the South Pasadena police, they discovered an apartment severely cluttered, with Vanessa lying on her bed. When she saw she wasn’t alone, she screamed, and appeared to go into a seizure.
A clinician was called to the apartment, and determined Marquez was in need of hospitalization. Marquez refused to go. When told she was being detained and would be forcibly taken, she pulled out what appeared to be a gun. The officers immediately retreated out of the apartment. When Marquez came out brandishing the gun moments later, they fired a dozen rounds at Marquez, two of which struck her torso.
It was later discovered that the gun was in fact a BB gun. But by then it was too late. Marquez was declared dead upon arrival at the hospital — the one place the financially struggling actress was so desperate to avoid.
“She knew if she left her home, she’d probably end up homeless,” Garcia said.
In February of this year, the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office determined the officers who killed Marquez had acted legally and declined to prosecute them. Four months later, Marquez’s mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the officers. Two weeks ago, she filed a second lawsuit in federal court, citing civil rights violations.
“Ms. Marquez’s death was the result of overreaction, excessive use of force, and gross mishandling of the situation” by the police, the lawsuit alleges.
This would not be the first time the police have been criticized in their handling of the disabled.
In 2016, a report published by the Ruderman Family Foundation stated that almost half of people who die at the hands of police have some kind of disability.
One such example is the 2019 death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain. His death at the hands of police officers in Aurora, Colorado sparked renewed protests this year and a reexamining of McClain’s family’s case. While attention was particularly drawn to McClain’s race — he was black — McClain also had autism, a neurodevelopmental disability that can include challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech, and nonverbal communication.
“Disability intersects with other factors such as race, class, gender, and sexuality,” the Ruderman Family Foundation report said. These factors, in turn, “magnify degrees of marginalization and increase the risk of violence.”
This rings true for people like Marquez in a community like South Pasadena, where only 18.5% of the population is Hispanic or Latino, according to the 2019 US Census. In comparison, the city of Los Angeles has a Hispanic or Latino population of 48.6%.
“This town has no social services in place for people like Vanessa and the disabled,” said Garcia at the end of the rally. “The South Pasadena Police Department didn’t do everything in their power to not shoot her.”
