Handling of O.C. teen’s death probed

The Orange County district attorney’s office has opened an investigation into the way sheriff’s officials handled the apparent suicide of the teenage son of two sheriff’s lieutenants who was found shot to death at his mother’s home.

The boy’s death in January has drawn scrutiny from county prosecutors in part because homicide detectives were not initially sent to the scene, nobody kept track of who came and went from the home, and the body was removed before the detectives arrived, according to law enforcement sources and others familiar with the circumstances.

The gun, which was registered to the boy’s mother, was among evidence collected by sheriff’s officials and retrieved this week by county prosecutors.

The 16-year-old died Jan. 7 from a gunshot to the head, the sheriff’s coroner confirmed this week.

Coroner’s officials concluded that the death was a suicide but declined to release the report to The Times, saying the case had been turned over to the district attorney.

It is common for Sheriff’s Department executives and deputies to go to a crime or accident scene to comfort colleagues who’ve been injured or suffered a loss. But prosecutors reportedly are concerned that high-ranking commanders failed to follow their own rules in investigating the death and could have inadvertently disturbed what might have been a crime scene.

Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson was among department officials who arrived at the Villa Park home after the boy’s body was discovered, according to those at the scene and others familiar with the events.

Department spokesman Jim Amormino said Thursday that the case had been turned over to prosecutors this week. He declined to discuss details but said: “Sometimes investigations are not done strictly by the books because life is not done strictly by the books. Sometimes compassion does play a part in the way we handle cases.”

The Sheriff’s Department is dealing with a series of scandals, including the 2007 indictment of former Sheriff Michael S. Carona on corruption charges and a damning grand jury report that showed the department had suffered a breakdown as it tried to investigate the beating death of an inmate at Theo Lacy Jail in Orange.

The lieutenants in this case are divorced. The boy lived with his father in Irvine but was at his mother’s home in Villa Park at the time of the shooting. The Times is not naming the couple or their son because there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

The family’s lawyer declined to comment.

According to officials from the district attorney’s office and Sheriff’s Department who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, this is what happened:

The shooting was reported by the boy’s older brother, who called his father at work. The father arrived at the scene before patrol deputies.

Anderson, then-Undersheriff Jo Ann Galisky and assistant sheriffs Steve Bishop and Dan Martini arrived a short time later. Capt. Christine Murray, who is in charge of the department’s communication center, responded as a grief counselor.

Under department policy, apparent suicides are initially treated as homicides until it can be established there are no signs of foul play. But homicide detectives weren’t dispatched to the scene for at least 45 minutes after the shooting was reported. And they learned of the death only because word of it was sweeping through department headquarters.

By the time two homicide detectives arrived, the yellow tape that is normally used to protect a crime scene had been taken down and the body had been removed by the coroner’s office.

The detectives were prevented from interviewing the teen’s parents at the scene, and no one kept an incident log of who came and went. The logs are commonly used to preserve crime scenes and to track who had access to them.

This week, district attorney’s investigators retrieved the gun and other evidence from the Sheriff’s Department and served the department with subpoenas for all investigative records, including the autopsy and interview reports and gunshot residue testing, according to two sources familiar with the case.

Although California law makes it a felony for someone to leave a handgun accessible to a minor who uses the weapon to cause injury or death, prosecutors often do not seek criminal charges against parents whose children are killed.

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christine.hanley@latimes.com

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stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com