Adanté Pointer

The Man Carrying the Gun Away

A police camera captured K’aun Green ending a danger. Adanté Pointer built the case around what happened in the next four seconds.

Above His Head

The fight inside a San Jose taqueria had already produced a gun. K’aun Green, a college football player, wrested it from the armed man. When police arrived, Green was backing through the front door with the weapon raised over his head, carrying it away from the struggle.

Officer Mark McNamara saw Green and fired. Five rounds came from the officer’s rifle; four struck Green. Six other officers at the scene withheld fire. Surveillance video preserved the movement on which the case would turn: Green emerging, the gun elevated, his body moving away from the danger inside.

Police shootings often arrive in court compressed into the fraction of a second when an officer pulls the trigger. Adanté Pointer widened the frame. The gun had a history before Green crossed the doorway. So did Green’s hands. Seconds earlier, those hands had stopped an armed man from harming the people around him. The video allowed a jury to see the act whole.

The City of San Jose agreed in 2026 to pay $8 million to resolve Green’s civil-rights case. Investigators also uncovered racist text messages McNamara had sent about Green and Pointer. The officer resigned, California decertified him from law enforcement, and prosecutors reviewed criminal cases connected to his work. The words belonged to the same officer who had looked through a rifle sight at a Black man carrying a weapon above his head.

The Man at the Door

Pointer had seen a beating interrupted by a witness long before he became counsel in Green’s case. In 2003, while studying for the bar examination at his home in West Oakland, he looked outside and saw police officers beating a man in a vacant lot. Pointer shouted that he could see them. The beating stopped.

Two weeks later, the injured man appeared at his door. He had found the house from which the voice came. Pointer had no license yet and no case file, but he knew where to send him: the office of John Burris, whose name had become inseparable from police-misconduct litigation in the Bay Area.

The encounter contained the essential elements of a civil-rights case. Force occurred in a place where officers expected control of the account. An outside witness changed what they were willing to do. The person who survived then had to find that witness again. A shout across a vacant lot became the first available evidence beyond the officers’ own words.

Pointer’s route to John Burris had required its own persistence. At UC Hastings, after work for Representative Barbara Lee sharpened his interest in civil-rights practice, he sent repeated messages to Burris seeking a clerkship. One day he spotted Burris driving through Oakland, pulled alongside him at a stoplight, and made his case through the window. Burris hired him. Pointer would spend fifteen years learning how a family’s account, a police report, a deposition, and a city’s own records meet in litigation.

The Platform at Fruitvale

Pointer’s apprenticeship with John Burris brought him into the civil litigation over Oscar Grant’s killing. On New Year’s Day 2009, a BART officer shot Grant as he lay face down on the platform at Fruitvale Station. Passengers’ cellphones recorded the shooting from several angles.

Pointer worked through discovery, depositions, witnesses, and the daily demands surrounding Grant’s family. The civil cases resolved for a combined $2.8 million. Passengers’ videos allowed the public to compare the shooting with each explanation that followed.

Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson, remained close to Pointer after the litigation ended. Pointer continued supporting the family after the formal close of the case.

The recurring names in his docket trace a geography of Bay Area force. Sixteen-year-old Elena Mondragon was pregnant and seated in the passenger side of a BMW when Fremont officers fired as the car moved through Hayward. A bullet entered through her side and killed her. In 2022, a federal jury awarded her family $21 million. Willie McCoy was twenty and asleep in a car at a Taco Bell drive-through before Vallejo officers fired dozens of rounds through the windshield. His family’s case resolved for $5 million.

The Vallejo cases also exposed a private ritual among officers who marked fatal shootings by bending the tips of their badges. A culture that could sound abstract in testimony had given itself a physical emblem. The badge carried both public authority and the private memory of a person killed under it.

Maurice Monk at Santa Rita Jail

Maurice Monk’s death unfolded at the opposite speed from a rifle shot. He entered Santa Rita Jail while suffering a medical crisis. He was later found face down in his cell, where his body had remained for days. His family was initially told he had died of a heart attack.

Pointer and his colleagues worked through roughly fifteen thousand pages and hundreds of hours of video. Custody disperses responsibility across intake forms, nurses, deputies, private contractors and successive shifts. The accumulation can make a death appear ownerless. Monk’s case gathered the missed observations and unmade decisions into one chronology.

The 2025 resolution totaled $9.5 million and included permanent changes to training and policy. The reforms addressed routine failures through which a detained person can become invisible: welfare checks, medical communication, cell observation and the handoff from one shift to the next. Monk’s body had remained in a staffed building. The evidence showed which employees passed Monk’s cell, what each was required to do, and where the procedures failed.

The Report to Human Resources

Pointer follows private power into the workplace as well. Joseph Sample drove a cement truck for Cemex. Sample, who is Black and disabled, reported racial slurs, disability-based harassment and repeated abuse. Coworkers corroborated complaints. Supervisors and human-resources personnel received them. The conduct continued.

At trial in 2026, the company’s written protections met the history of what happened when Sample invoked them. A jury awarded $5 million on his hostile-work-environment claims. The proof accumulated through recurrence: slurs spoken, complaints delivered, witnesses present, protection withheld. The same company that could describe a policy in polished language had to answer through the acts of the people charged with carrying it out.

For Pointer, the gap between formal protections and actual conditions has always been visible. He grew up in West Oakland and attended Catholic school in affluent Piedmont, where a parish recommendation gave him an early view of two neighboring worlds with sharply different resources. His great-grandmother had worked as a housekeeper. His grandfather was a carpenter and renovator. At a first-grade classmate’s house, Pointer saw eight boxes of cereal in one kitchen and asked what the boy’s father did. The boy answered that his father was an attorney.

Years later, Oakland officers stopped Pointer himself, ordered him from his car and made him crawl backward at gunpoint after saying his vehicle resembled one connected to a suspect. He survived the commands he had heard described by so many clients. He later turned the encounter into a short film for public education.

Evidence Outside the Official Account

Pointer’s career began with a witness at a window. Oscar Grant’s case had passengers’ cellphone videos. K’aun Green’s case had surveillance footage preserving the seconds before the officer fired. Maurice Monk’s case required hundreds of hours of jail video and thousands of pages to reconstruct what successive shifts did and failed to do.

Each record changed who controlled the account. A police report could be compared with the camera. A policy could be compared with actual welfare checks. A company’s anti-harassment language could be compared with complaints and the response of supervisors. Pointer’s trial method places those comparisons before the factfinder in a form that can be tested.

The Witness Who Stayed

The man beaten in West Oakland returned to Pointer’s door because the voice from the house had interrupted the force. Pointer’s later cases enlarged that role. The witness might be a bystander, a video, a coworker, a family member, or an internal record, but the task remains to preserve what power expected to pass without contradiction.

His own stop at gunpoint sharpened the meaning of that work without becoming its substitute. The case still has to be built from evidence, law, and damages. Pointer’s docket shows how an outside account can survive the encounter, reach a courtroom, and produce compensation, public findings, or changes in institutional practice.