D.A. to Probe Brutality Claims in Murder Cases

Investigators will pursue two deported illegal aliens to Mexico, if necessary, to question them about allegations that police used physical force to get them to confess to murders they could not have committed, a senior deputy in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said Thursday.

Steven A. Sowders, who heads the district attorney’s special investigations division, said his unit has opened a formal investigation into charges made by attorneys for Ruben Avila Trujillo and Pedro Barrios Delvillar, who were taken to Mexico earlier this week after murder and robbery charges against them were dismissed.

“We’ll do everything we can to convince them that it’s in their best interests to speak to us, that we’re independent of the Police Department and they have nothing to fear from us,” Sowders said.

The case is also being reviewed by the district attorney’s hard-core gang division, which filed the original charges, and by the Police Department’s internal affairs division, officials said.

The prosecution had sought the dismissal after confirming that Trujillo, 24, accused in two downtown Los Angeles street murders that occurred within hours of each other on March 21, was in San Diego County Jail that day. Delvillar, 18, who was charged with one of the killings, was in a California Youth Authority facility in Ventura when it happened.

Joe Flanders, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the two men had been taken to a detention center after their release from County Jail on Tuesday and had voluntarily boarded a bus to Tijuana rather than undergo a hearing process.

Belinda Fischer, deputy public defender representing Delvillar, expressed surprise that her client had left the country so quickly. She said she had instructed Delvillar to tell the immigration service that his parents live here and that he did not want to be deported.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the Police Department made any effort to block the deportation, officials said. Deputy Dist. Atty. Loren M. Naiman, the prosecutor in the murder cases, said he did not try to contact the defendants because Fischer had refused to allow him or police investigators to talk to them.

“In all candor, anybody who talked to my client would have to be somebody who didn’t have a built-in interest in the results (of the conversation),” Fischer said.

Trujillo’s attorney, James A. Goldstein, said he expected his client to return to Los Angeles. He noted that Trujillo was deported once before--last Oct. 27--only to return the next morning, the day he was arrested.

“I think it was in their interest to get on the bus because they were afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department,” Goldstein said. “I don’t think it was unreasonable.”

Goldstein has charged that Trujillo was slapped and punched by Detective James McCann until he agreed to confess to the stabbing deaths of Callejas Gonzalez, 23, and Albert Diaz Martinez, 18.

Fischer, who initially said her client told her that he had been “intimidated and terrified” during a separate interview with McCann, said Thursday that the detective used force to extract Delvillar’s confession in the Gonzales slaying.

Delvillar “specifically said he was slapped open-handedly across the face and jerked up by the shirt front,” his lawyer said. “McCann said to him, ‘I’ll kick your ass if you don’t tell me the truth.’ ”

Police spokesman Cmdr. William Booth said McCann does not intend to respond publicly to these allegations while the investigations are pending.