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Fatal Encounters record · Independent third-party dataset

Santiago (Chago) Villanueva

April 16, 2002 · Bloomfield, Essex County

Details as recorded

Every value below is shown exactly as Fatal Encounters recorded it.[1]

Name as recorded
Santiago (Chago) Villanueva
Age as recorded
35
Gender as recorded
Male
Race as reported
Hispanic/Latino
Date of the injury resulting in death
April 16, 2002
Location as recorded
Bloomfield, Essex County5 Lawrence St Bloomfield NJ 07003 Essex
Highest level of force as recorded
Asphyxiated/Restrained

Where the dataset places it

The location Fatal Encounters recorded for this death: Bloomfield, Essex County

The marked point is the dataset's own geocoded location for this record, as recorded. Every other New Jersey record in the dataset is shown in gray. A point on a map is where a death was recorded, not a finding about anyone.

Agencies as recorded

Agency or agencies involved, as recorded: Bloomfield Police Department

An agency appears here because it appears in the record's as-reported agency field, nothing more. Its presence is not a claim of fault or responsibility.

Department pages (matched by this site at high confidence)

The source's account

Fatal Encounters' description of the incident, verbatim. This is the source project's own third-party narrative, not this site's reporting.

Villanueva's garment factory co-workers called police for help with his epileptic seizure. They arrived and found him uncooperative and combative. Wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by four officers, witnesses described police shouting for him to speak English, and taking his foaming at the mouth as a sign of drug use. He died of "mechanical asphyxia following physical restraint". The four were charged with manslaughter.

Source reported by Fatal Encounters: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/homicide-is-ruled-in-death-of-man-in-police-custody.html (external link, as recorded in the dataset).

If you are a family member of the person named here, or represent one, and something in this record is wrong, or you want the record removed, requests go through the corrections page. Every request is checked against the source record.

This is one of 22 New Jersey records the dataset dates to 2002, and one of 118 it holds for Essex County across 2000 to 2021. Browse every New Jersey Fatal Encounters record by year.

Records from the same county and year

Questions and answers

What does the Fatal Encounters dataset record about this incident?

Fatal Encounters records that Santiago (Chago) Villanueva died on April 16, 2002 in Bloomfield, Essex County, with "Asphyxiated/Restrained" as the highest level of force. Fatal Encounters is an independent, crowdsourced dataset of deaths that occurred during police encounters of any kind; a record is not a finding of fault or misconduct.

Which agency or agencies were recorded as involved?

The record's agency field reads "Bloomfield Police Department". Presence in that field means the agency appears in the record as reported, nothing more; it is not a claim of fault or responsibility by any officer or agency.

Where did this happen?

The record places the death in Bloomfield, Essex County, on April 16, 2002. The address as recorded is 5 Lawrence St Bloomfield NJ 07003 Essex.

Sources

  1. [1]Fatal Encounters, New Jersey subset. Fatal Encounters (fatalencounters.org). Row 29421. Derived from the public Fatal Encounters national dataset (coverage 2000-2021; collection ended December 2021), https://fatalencounters.org/. Retrieved July 10, 2026. ↩