OAKLAND >> Castlemont High School students and staff spent their graduation ceremony on Friday grieving the death of beloved teacher Marvin Boomer, who died when a car that had been chased by California Highway Patrol officers barreled through an intersection where he and his romantic partner had been on an evening stroll.

The death of Boomer, a 40-year-old Oakland resident who held a doctorate degree, has reignited a debate over whether law enforcement officers should be allowed to pursue suspected criminals through the streets of Oakland. Doorbell video of the crash showed the two being struck as a fire hydrant was sent flying and the car toppled a green sign warning drivers to slow down, which had recently been purchased by residents in the neighborhood east of Lake Merritt.

His death left family members and the community stunned, casting a pall over the East Oakland high school’s graduation ceremony Friday, when students credited Boomer for their academic success and personal growth.

The tragedy took place days after Oakland’s police chief formally proposed relaxing some of the department’s restrictions on officer chases — policies that Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously urged the city to loosen.

The unlicensed driver believed to be at the center of the crash, 18-year-old Eric Scott Hernandez-Garcia, was charged Friday with vehicular manslaughter and several other felonies, including evading police, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office said. He remained held at the Santa Rita Jail without bail.

Boomer, a college and career coach at Castlemont High, was pronounced dead near the front steps of a home. He held a Ph.D. in philosophy since 2023.

“He was a brilliant young man,” Marvin’s uncle, Nathaniel Boomer, said. “He would always bend over backwards to help the family and others.”

On Friday morning, broken car parts and glass littered the grass near the sidewalk on E. 21st Street where Boomer and his partner were struck two nights before. A fire hydrant that had stood at the intersection’s corner laid on its side some 30 feet away from a small — but growing — memorial for Boomer.

A neighbor, 75-year-old Sarah Polk, said she had been sitting inside the house Wednesday night when she heard a motorist approaching and thought, “Wow, this guy is really moving.” Then she heard a thunderous collision that rattled her house.

Polk rushed outside to find a woman, who appeared bloodied, stumbling up the front door steps and begging, “I need help, help me, call 911.”

The woman then rushed back down to Boomer, who appeared to be wedged into the stairs’ metal railing. The woman tugged at his arm, but he would not move.

“It was so heartbreaking,” Polk said.

For more than a decade, Oakland police policy has barred officers from pursuing suspects at speeds over 50 miles per hour without authorization from their supervisors — a rule developed and later enhanced on two separate occasions by former police chiefs,

But the rule for Oakland police does not apply to California Highway Patrol, the state law enforcement agency that led Wednesday’s pursuit and whose increased presence has been felt in town for over a year on Newsom’s orders.

Just five months ago, the governor demanded Oakland leaders change its policy, calling the city an “extreme outlier,” suggesting he would pull CHP’s help from the city if the rule wasn’t changed. At a civilian-oversight meeting last week, police Chief Floyd Mitchell called for rescinding the 50-mph limit, saying pursuits are far less frequent now than in 2022, when an outlier number of chases led Mitchell’s predecessor to establish the cap.

One of the pursuits that year, a “ghost chase” led by OPD officers that led to the death of a bystander, has prompted a civil-rights lawsuit and shares some similarities to the collision that took Boomer’s life.

For skeptics of police pursuits, crashes like these are a frustrating reminder of the potentially deadly consequences behind overturning limitations on when — and how — police can pursue suspects. A vigil for Boomer was expected to be held Friday evening by the Anti Police-Terror Project, a frequent critic of Oakland police.

“The governor came here and ran his mouth, talking about what a bad policy it was, when the department wrote it,” civil rights attorney Jim Chanin said in an interview. “It was totally pointless to get involved because it was working well.”

The pursuit Wednesday that led to Boomer’s death had begun miles away; he was already wanted for felony evasion when law enforcement spotted him driving an Infiniti G35. At about 7:30 p.m., CHP officers tried to pull over Hernandez-Garcia near 102nd Avenue and International Boulevard, not far from the San Leandro border.