Deputies Accused of Negligence in Killing of Crippled Man

Every pair of pants ever owned by Albert Belmontez ended up nearly worn through along the right waistband, where he had to grip the fabric each time he wanted to move his artificial leg.

With each step, the stocky 27-year-old San Dimas man would hike up his jeans, rock to the left and swing the right limb forward in an awkward, penguin-like gait that had handicapped him since birth.

“He never let it get him down,” said Lorraine King, a neighbor on the quiet dead-end street where Belmontez lived. “It got to be painful. But he always had a smile on his face.”

It was the same Albert Belmontez who Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies say charged them with a kitchen knife last June when they responded to a domestic dispute at the tiny brick-and-stucco house he shared with his sister.

When the officers could back up no farther, officials say, one deputy repeatedly fired his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at Belmontez, killing him with 10 shots to the chest, head and back.

In claims filed recently against the Sheriff’s Department, the Belmontez family accuses the deputies of negligence and excessive force for gunning down a man who they say was probably trying only to balance his prothesis.

“If an officer can shoot somebody 10 times like this, I don’t think he has any business being on the street,” said Robert W. Thompson, the family’s attorney and director of the Inland Empire Victims’ Rights Center. “To me, that’s just outrageous.”

If the county counsel rejects the claims, which it is expected to do, Thompson will have six months in which to file a lawsuit. He will probably ask for $1.2 million in damages, Thompson said.

The two deputies named in the claims, Walter G. Brown, 28, who has worked six years in the department, and Michael Keating, 28, a seven-year veteran, have been instructed not to discuss the incident.

But Sgt. Ike Aguilar, who investigated the shooting, defended their actions and warned against second-guessing an officer confronted with a 223-pound man wielding a 12-inch knife.

“They shot him in self-defense,” Aguilar said. “I can’t say what’s going through an officer’s mind in a given situation. It’s an instantaneous-type thing, a reaction . . . to a deadly situation.”

On Wehner Lane, a block-long private road where Albert Belmontez lived, the reaction has been somber.

Belmontez worked for the minimum wage in a local factory manufacturing police badges. He is remembered as something of a Jack-of-all-trades who compensated for his disability with generosity and big smiles, always offering to fix just about anybody’s car for a few bucks or a few beers.

Several of the 1950s-era one-story bungalows that sit below the foothills of San Dimas--an east San Gabriel Valley city of 32,500--still have American flags flying at half-staff. Neighbors and friends so far have raised more than $1,000 to help with burial costs and pay for a private investigator.

“Everybody misses him,” said his father, Albert R. Belmontez, 52, a chicken-feed hauler who, with his wife, Soledad, is back living at the house he had given to his son. “We just can’t understand why this had to happen.”

Neither can his daughter, Helen Perez, 31, who was arguing with her brother Albert Jr. on the evening of June 20 and ran angrily out of the house to call police from a neighbor’s telephone.

“Albert got nasty and told me to get out of here and then pushed me away,” Perez said. “I guess I just thought a cop would calm things down or shut him up.”

The two officers who arrived called for her brother to come out of the house, Perez said, but he didn’t respond. Then one of the officers stepped forward to slide open a window.

According to a sheriff’s spokesman, Belmontez suddenly reached through the window and grabbed one of the deputies, starting a struggle in which the officer cut himself on some shattered glass.

Perez, however, said she saw her brother slam the window shut, surprising the officer, who she says lost his balance and broke the glass with his flashlight.

Either way, Belmontez, who according to an autopsy probably had drunk at least a six-pack of beer, then swung open the front door shouting obscenities at the deputies.

Officers say he lunged from the doorway gripping the wood handle of a stainless-steel kitchen knife. They ordered him to stop. “Put the knife down,” a neighbor, Michael (Krikit) Monteleone, recalls hearing as he watched the conflict from his front yard next door.

Perez, who was standing with one deputy to the right of her brother, doesn’t remember seeing a knife. Ted Sayegh, another neighbor who watched through a window, doesn’t either.

But the other deputy, who was standing in the front yard about 10 to 15 feet away, says Belmontez charged him.

“The deputy backed up, pulled his gun and backed up to where he couldn’t back up any farther,” Deputy Hal Grant of the Sheriff’s Information Bureau reported the next day. “He kept coming, so he shot him--several times.”

Perez said her brother didn’t have a chance, that he still had his hand gripping his pants as he tried to swing his leg off the doorstep. Other neighbors agree that the shots exploded only seconds after Belmontez appeared in the doorway.

“Even if he had dropped the knife, it wouldn’t have hit the ground by the time they shot him,” Monteleone said.

But Aguilar said an internal investigation has cleared the deputy of any wrongdoing.

“Even though he only had one leg, Albert was a huge man,” Aguilar said. “And he kept coming at them.”

It wasn’t Belmontez’s first brush with the law. As a teen-ager, he was convicted and served more than a year for being an accessory to a drive-by shooting aimed at the San Dimas sheriff’s substation.

But the family’s attorney says he didn’t do anything to deserve getting killed that night in June on his front doorstep.

“No one can justify that,” Thompson said. “In my mind, he was a victim of violent crime.”