A former Modesto Police officer who shot and killed an unarmed fleeing man five years ago has been cleared to seek a law enforcement job with some other agency.
The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training has closed its review without decertifying Joseph Lamantia, according to a March 20 POST document.
Lamantia killed Trevor Seever, 29, as Seever ran from the officer outside a church in west Modesto on Dec. 29, 2020. Family members had told police that Seever said he had acquired a gun and they were concerned about his mental state and their safety. Seever was unarmed when he was fatally shot.
Lamantia was fired and charged with voluntary manslaughter, and City Hall paid Seever’s survivors $7.5 million in an April 2023 civil lawsuit settlement. The officer had shot five people, killing four, in an 11-year period.
But a judge dismissed the criminal case against Lamantia in July 2023, ruling that his actions were consistent with that of a reasonable officer.
A La Quinta-based attorney representing the former Modesto officer in his ongoing civil rights lawsuit against Stanislaus County and its prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Modesto Chief stands by firing decision
Modesto Police Chief Brandon Gillespie is “disappointed” that the POST commission failed to decertify Lamantia, freeing the former officer to look for another job as a cop, the police chief said in a March 20 message to the Modesto City Council obtained by The Modesto Focus.
“Decertification is an important accountability mechanism intended to ensure that officers who engage in serious misconduct are not able to continue serving in law enforcement elsewhere,” Gillespie wrote.
The police chief also wrote, “It is important to emphasize that this determination does not invalidate or otherwise change the findings of our internal investigation. Following a thorough administrative review, I determined that the use of force in this incident violated department policy, and the officer’s employment was terminated. I continue to stand by that decision.”
Lamantia notes in his lawsuit that an expert hired by the Stanislaus District Attorney’s office cleared Lamantia of wrongdoing, and asserts that he should not have been prosecuted. A trial date has not been scheduled for the case in U.S. Eastern District Court, in Sacramento.
‘Cast-off’ former officers hired around state
Before 2022, officers accused of serious misconduct had little trouble moving to a similar job with another agency. That changed with Senate Bill 2, which tasked POST with investigating complaints and decertifying officers when warranted.
“Too many lives have been lost due to racial profiling and excessive use of force,” Governor Gavin Newsom said when signing the legislation. “We cannot change what is past, but we can build accountability.”
At the same time, police agencies throughout the state have increasingly turned to “cast-off” officers to plug hard-to-fill vacancies, the San Francisco Chronicle found in an analysis of POST data, assisted by UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.
The trend has steadily built over two decades and picked up in the past five years, “fueled in part by a surge of (police) retirements,” the Chronicle reported.
The largest share of misconduct allegations are complaints of physical abuse at officers’ hands, the Public Policy Institute of California found in a June 2025 review, followed by allegations of bias. At that point, more than 100 officers had been decertified among 36,000 complaints received by POST since 2023, the PPIC found.
A serious case backlog developed “as (POST) struggles to hire investigators,” KPBS reported in March 2025.
Seever’s family, friends and dozens of community members have staged several protests and events in his memory since his death, and have aired complaints during public comment sections of many Modesto City Council meetings.
The deaths of Seever and George Floyd – in 2020 by a kneeling Minneapolis policeman, which sparked national protests – figured in the Modesto City Council’s decision to establish a Community Police Review Board and to hire an independent police auditor.
The POST document does not cite facts specific to Lamantia, but acknowledges that the commission’s findings don’t always align with those of officers’ employers.
“POST may close a case even where the agency correctly sustained a finding of misconduct,” the document reads.
People can search for information related to officer misconduct in a Police Records Access Project database jointly published by CalMatters, The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED.
Garth Stapley is the accountability reporter for The Modesto Focus, a project of the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact him at garth@themodestofocus.org.