Sheriff’s deputy shot to death guarded highly dangerous inmates

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A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy gunned down Saturday outside his boyhood home in Cypress Park had been assigned to guard the most dangerous inmates in the county, including members of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, authorities said Sunday.

Los Angeles police and sheriff’s officials said the prospect that Deputy Juan Abel Escalante was killed because of his work at the jail remained one of three possible motives. Investigators were also considering the possibility that neighborhood gang violence or a personal grudge were behind the killing, report Stuart Pfeifer and Tami Abdollah.

Detectives from LAPD’s robbery-homicide division were investigating the killing with the assistance of detectives from the sheriff’s homicide division and the jail’s gang unit. Sheriff Lee Baca said Escalante’s assignment put him in touch with members of the Mexican Mafia, a gang known to direct street crime and violence from behind prison walls.

Read on about the case of Juan Abel Escalante here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City