Luis Carrillo

The Long Walkout

Luis A. Carrillo and a Lifetime Against Impunity

I. Spring, 1968

Luis A. Carrillo’s career began in the spring of 1968, when thousands of East Los Angeles students walked out of their high schools to demand an education equal to their dignity and met surveillance, intimidation, and force.

The grievances were concrete: crumbling classrooms, curricula that erased Mexican American students, and counselors steering them away from college.

From the walkouts, Carrillo moved through the United States Marine Corps, UCLA, Boalt Hall at Berkeley, and admission to the California bar in 1976. He used discovery to obtain what officials had denied in public: documents, testimony, and the decisions behind official action.

The firm reports more than $800 million in recoveries across five decades of cases against school districts, police agencies, and public entities, alongside changes in school policy, police training, crowd control, and survivor protections.

II. A Firm Built on Access and Trust

From its offices in South Pasadena, the Carrillo Law Firm grew into a bilingual, intergenerational practice: Carrillo working beside his son, Michael, and a team of trial lawyers seasoned in police misconduct, school abuse, catastrophic injury, and wrongful death. Michael has said that his father’s habit of taking on righteous fights for nothing, even in lean years, fixed the firm’s philosophy for good — lead with compassion.

The bilingual, intergenerational firm begins with access and trust. Clients often arrive carrying trauma, distrust, and years of denial by public agencies. The lawyers reconstruct the history in the client’s language and build the resources needed to outlast resistance from public agencies.

III. Schools, Children, and the Cost of Concealment

A major part of Carrillo’s practice concerns school systems accused of ignoring warnings about abuse.

In 2012, Los Angeles was shaken by the arrest of Mark Berndt, a veteran teacher at Miramonte Elementary who had abused students and photographed his crimes. Carrillo represented dozens of families and pursued what the district had known: complaints reaching back to 1990 and 1993, followed by years without effective intervention. The remaining litigation ended in a settlement of more than $139 million for eighty-two children.

Repeated warnings placed the district’s own knowledge at the center of the Miramonte case. Continued access after those warnings connected the individual crimes to district decisions and made policy change part of the remedy.

Later school cases revealed similar warning failures. At De La Torre Elementary, discovery surfaced a confidential district memo describing parents protesting teacher Robert Pimentel’s conduct toward young girls. The case settled for $58 million. In other matters, Carrillo challenged the district’s treatment of children reporting sexual assault and demanded state investigation of its litigation tactics.

His work for children also reaches lethal negligence. Moises Murillo, an eight-year-old boy with Down syndrome, depended on a specialized wheelchair with a five-point harness. School staff moved him to an ordinary seat, secured him with a gait belt, and left him alone. After he fell backward and died, depositions established that staff had ignored his individualized education program. Luis and Michael Carrillo recovered $18 million for the family.

IV. Force, Custody, and the Official Story

The other half of Carrillo’s docket descends directly from what he watched police do to student demonstrators in 1968. He has litigated shootings, custodial deaths, and crowd-control violence — encounters in which the official account is, for a time, the only account. Such cases turn on reconstruction: video and policy, autopsy and testimony, tactical training and the precise sequence of decisions by which an ordinary encounter became irreversible harm. His force and custody cases use discovery, video, policy, autopsy records, and testimony to test official accounts.

On May Day of 2007, officers of the LAPD’s elite Metro Division waded into a peaceful immigration rally at MacArthur Park with batons swinging and rubber bullets flying, injuring forty-two people, demonstrators and journalists alike. When the department’s disciplinary process ended with no officers fired and nothing sterner than a twenty-day suspension, Carrillo called it “a slap on the wrist” and pressed claims for some forty of the injured. The litigation that followed produced $13 million in settlements and changes to LAPD crowd-control policies, training, and command protocols for public demonstrations.

Edward Bronstein at the Altadena Station

In March 2020, two months before the world learned George Floyd’s name, the thirty-eight-year-old was pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence and brought to the California Highway Patrol’s Altadena station, where, terrified of needles, he hesitated over a blood draw. A nearly eighteen-minute video shows six officers forcing the handcuffed man face-down on a mat while a nurse works. He screams that he can’t breathe. He pleads: “I’ll do it willingly, I promise!” An officer replies, “It’s too late.” Bronstein falls silent and becomes unresponsive while the blood draw continues.

The Carrillo firm’s federal civil-rights suit ended in a $24 million settlement from the State of California. Seven CHP officers and the attending nurse were later charged, and the CHP changed its policies to prohibit techniques or transport methods carrying a substantial risk of positional asphyxia.

A year and a half later, in Long Beach, a school district safety officer fired into a car as it drove away from a fistfight and struck eighteen-year-old Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez in the head. She never woke; her heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys went on to save five strangers. “For this officer to go after the car and to start shooting inside the car was totally against policy, against training, and against common sense,” Carrillo told the press. The case ended with a $13 million settlement. The Board of Education fired the officer, and prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder.

When federal immigration agents swept through Southern California, Carrillo and his son filed federal tort claims for six people—five United States citizens and one lawful permanent resident—who alleged unlawful detention, racial profiling, or excessive force. The clients included Javier Ramirez, who reported spending several days in federal custody despite identifying himself as a citizen, and Cary Lopez Alvarado, who was detained while nine months pregnant.

V. Published Rules and Legislative Protection

Carrillo’s appellate work has produced rules governing later cases and has reached the California Supreme Court.

Its culmination came in 2023, in Jane Doe v. Superior Court. His client was a girl assaulted by her fourth-grade teacher in 2009 and 2010, and then — unthinkably — abused again by a family friend in 2013. When she sued the school district that had failed to protect her, defense lawyers moved to put the second assault before the jury, hoping to blame her devastation on it and shrink what the district owed for the first. The trial court let the evidence in, reasoning that California’s civil rape-shield law did not cover “involuntary” conduct, and the Court of Appeal agreed. Carrillo and his co-counsel pushed on, and the Supreme Court — staying the trial mid-course, a rarity — reversed unanimously. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero’s opinion established that the shield protects survivors of involuntary abuse as well, and that any defendant seeking to probe a plaintiff’s history must first clear the statute’s demanding procedural gates.

The firm then worked with State Senator Anna Caballero on Senate Bill 1386—often called “Suzie’s Law”—which amended Evidence Code section 1106 to bar that evidence when used to argue consent or the absence of injury.

Two decades earlier, Carrillo represented Jesus G., one of two minors detained as material witnesses in In re Francisco M. The appellate court required prompt hearings and emphasized that detention under Penal Code section 1332 remains bounded by the California Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonably detaining witnesses.

VI. The Los Angeles City Council Proclamation

At a December 2023 Los Angeles City Council meeting, Carrillo described the work as unfinished: “We got a lot of work to do in the future.”