City Approves Preliminary Settlement in Jail Death

The family of a 40-year-old man, whose death in a Los Angeles Police Department holding cell aroused charges of a brutal beating at the hands of police, will receive several hundred thousand dollars under a tentative settlement announced Friday.

The settlement, which must still be approved by the City Council, cut short an anticipated monthlong trial in which lawyers for the family of Charles Hill said they would present evidence of a systematic police policy in the Hollywood Division of punishing troublesome prisoners with “the boot,” a charge city officials vigorously deny.

Hill, a one-time successful sales executive who had been down on his luck in the months before his 1981 arrest on suspicion of PCP intoxication, died about two hours after he scuffled violently with officers and was handcuffed and hogtied in a Hollywood holding cell.

An autopsy of his badly bruised body found no evidence of drugs and concluded that he had died of sickle cell crisis. The finding was disputed by a family-hired pathologist who found hemorrhaging around a broken rib and evidence that Hill actually died of heavy pressure to his neck.

Came Forward

Later, a 12-year police veteran came forward, claiming that he had witnessed several officers viciously beating and kicking Hill as he lay tied in his cell. Sgt. Carl Algee passed a polygraph test, but city officials discounted his recollection because it came at a time when he was seeking a disability retirement for alleged job stress and the account was not substantiated by any other witnesses.

“My clients feel vindicated, they feel satisfied and there’s really nothing else left to do,” attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of three attorneys representing Hill’s mother, the woman he lived with for 10 years and five children, said of the settlement.

Assistant City Atty. Robert Seeman said the settlement recommendation was made “in the best economic interests of the city, which is being sued and presented with some allegations which have the potential for a judgment against us.”

But Seeman added, “I am firmly convinced that the city and its employees did absolutely nothing wrong in regard to Mr. Hill. . . . The police officers who apprehended Mr. Hill acted perfectly properly and subjected themselves to a lot of physical abuse and injury in restraining him, for which society should thank these officers, instead of accusing them of misconduct.”

Seeman said his “great regret” over the settlement “is that I’m being deprived of the opportunity to vindicate the officers who were wrongfully accused of misconduct.”

Arresting officers Dale Erwin and Skip Giuliani, both still with the police force, waited quietly in an empty courtroom throughout the settlement discussions this week but declined to discuss the case.

Both sides refused to disclose the amount of the settlement pending the City Council’s action, but Cochran indicated that it is “midway” between the $125,000 the city offered before the trial, which began this week, and the $500,000 demanded then by the plaintiffs.

Though Hill’s family described him as a successful salesman whose daughters came to stay with him every summer after he left their mother in New Jersey and moved to Hollywood, a markedly different picture emerged from the police reports of Hill’s arrest on the evening of March 14, 1981.

Flailing Arms

Officers said they found Hill standing in the intersection of Hawthorne Avenue and Orange Drive flailing his arms and kicking at cars as they swerved to avoid him.

Giuliani recognized Hill as the man he had arrested two days earlier rifling through mail boxes and undressing near his car, an incident which had left Giuliani with a sprained wrist and forearm when Hill resisted.

“You’re going to have to shoot me,” Hill told officers as they approached him, and the arrest led to another violent scuffle that police said left cuts and bruises on all three but no evidence of any serious injury, according to police reports.

Police said they placed Hill in the holding cell in order to calm him and checked on him every half hour, removing his shoes at one point when he began chewing on them.

Algee’s allegations about the beating arose during his worker’s compensation hearing the following year, when he claimed part of his job stress stemmed from witnessing several officers brutally kicking Hill. The incident, he said, occurred with the supervising lieutenant’s knowledge.

Parachuting Accident

Psychiatrists for the city questioned the reliability of Algee’s memory, noting that he had suffered potentially brain-debilitating injuries during a parachuting accident.

But Cochran and co-counsels Howard Levine and Eric Ferrer said that at least three other present and former officers were prepared to testify about a longstanding policy within the Hollywood Division of kicking and beating--or “giving the boot”--to prisoners who resisted arrest.

“I’m chomping at the bit,” Algee said in an interview after the settlement. “I’ve waited for my chance to tell my story in court for six years, and the city didn’t give me a chance to do it.

“Because a lot more would have come out than just the Hill incident, and I really feel cheated. It (the settlement) was a real cowardly move by the city in order to hide the truth.”

Hill’s common-law wife, Leola Logan, said all of Hill’s family has been badly shaken. Hill’s elderly mother, Ruth, suffered a heart attack a few months after her only son’s death, she said.

The family, she added, finds it difficult to believe the police version of what happened, particularly claims that Hill was under the influence of PCP.

Poses Question

“It doesn’t sound like him,” she said. “But if he was, if he was, is that reason to kill him? You see? I mean, they have help for people like that, don’t they? And his hands were, God, handcuffed behind him, and his feet also? My God!

” . . . All I know is, the last time I saw him he was in a casket, and I could tell he had been beaten. He was a very, very black man, but as dark as he was, you could see the bruises on him in his casket. They could not hide them. They could not hide them. I tell you, I hope my daughters never have to see anything like that again.”

The lawsuit, in part, was to prevent what happened to Hill from happening again, she said.

“If nothing else, there’s too much of this going on. If for no other reason, just to put a stop to it. Because these are supposed to be our protectors, not our killers.”