His eyes glisten, wet with tears. He pauses before he speaks. There’s anguish in the tremble of his voice. It is the voice of a grieving father.

 

“When I think about Michael, my heart is full,” says Sung Man Cho, the letters RIP written on his black shirt. “It’s a hard time, but I’m sure that his death is not nothing. There is something behind it. I still pray to God, ‘Why?’”

 

Cho is not alone in seeking answers. Seven months after what many are calling a wrongful killing by two police officers, the district attorney office is coming under fire for failing to answer why Michael Cho was killed.

 

At a press conference on July 10, outraged Asian Americans gathered in Los Angeles’ Koreatown to launch a petition calling for a federal civil rights investigation. There, community leaders spoke against the acquittal of the two officers who shot the 25-year-old artist 11 times at Seven Gold Liquor store in La Habra, Calif.

 

“We have not yet been given much information other than the conclusion that their officers did nothing wrong,” said Grace Yoo, executive director of the Korean American Coalition in Los Angeles. “There’s no doubt that there was excessive use of force, and there were clearly different alternatives that could and should have been taken.”

 

On New Year’s Eve 2007, after dispatchers received a 911 call reporting multiple acts of car vandalism by an Asian male, police were directed to Cho, who was carrying a tire iron. The police parked their car, approached Cho and told him to drop the tire iron.

 

According to Jim Tanizaki, senior assistant district attorney of Orange County, Cho was “agitated and reacted in a bizarre manner when the officers, with guns drawn, ordered him to drop the weapon.”

 

Cho then walked away. Tanizaki added that when an officer moved in front of him, Cho raised the tire iron as if to strike, and was then gunned down by another officer.

 

But there are inconsistencies with the district attorney’s statement and the surveillance video tape that was retrieved by the Korea Times. In the tape, Cho seems calm, very different from Tanizaki’s description of him being “agitated.” In the video, Cho slowly walks away while one officer puts down his own gun.

 

The Cho family has since filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the Orange County Superior Court and has hired attorney Mark Geragos, best known for defending Michael Jackson, Winona Ryder and Scott Peterson.

 

“It was, in essence, a murder for nothing,” Geragos said at a June press conference in a terse statement against the acquittal of both officers.

While it has been a trying seven months for Cho’s family, Sung Man Cho remains hopeful.

 

“When I think of him, he’s up there in heaven,” he says pointing to the sky.