Deputies’ Response to a Parking Violation Costs Taxpayers $150,000

The call to the Norwalk Sheriff’s Station was routine: A truck was blocking parking spaces at a south Whittier mini-market.

But by the time the February, 1987, incident had run its course--through a fierce beating, a criminal trial and a civil lawsuit--it would stand as typical of dozens of cases that have led to millions of dollars in payouts by Los Angeles County on behalf of its sheriff’s deputies since mid-1986.

An everyday situation had led to a confrontation, then to a violent reaction by deputies with histories of excessive force. The deputies would not be disciplined. Criminal assault charges would be filed against the battered victim. A jury would acquit the victim after independent witnesses contradicted police reports. And the county would eventually pay a large sum--$150,000 in this case--to compensate the victim for injuries.

“This was just a horrible, outrageous thing,” said La Habra lawyer Peter Scalisi, who defended trucker Coy Willbanks, of Beulah, Mo., in his criminal trial.

Willbanks’ only crime, Scalisi argued, was illegal parking. And, the attorney said, that was prompted by 36 hours of nearly nonstop driving, which left the 26-year-old, novice trucker so exhausted and groggy that he refused to move his rig.

“Then they literally beat the living daylights out of the guy,” Scalisi said.

Prosecutors said Willbanks resisted arrest and kicked two deputies who went into the cab after him.

Some “unnecessary conduct” may have occurred after the trucker was pulled from the cab and several deputies struck him, Deputy Dist. Atty. Dinko Bozanich said. But Willbanks had committed the crimes by then.

“Nobody’s saying it was a slam dunk, but the case was there,” Bozanich said.

The prosecution hung on the testimony of Deputy Sam Ferri, a veteran officer with a long record of complaints about excessive force. He was first on the scene and radioed for help, bringing nearly a dozen deputies to the parking lot.

Short and muscular, Ferri pulled himself up to the cab and found the 6-foot, 230-pound Willbanks asleep.

Words were exchanged, Ferri testified, then the trucker kicked him out of the cab and onto the pavement below. Willbanks denies the kick, and a witness standing next to the cab testified that it never happened.

But, everyone agrees, that was when the beating began.

In the minutes that followed, an angry crowd of 25 to 30 gathered as Willbanks’ head was battered with flashlights and nightsticks, opening four gashes that required 25 stitches to close. His face was kicked “like a football,” four witnesses said, while he was pinned by deputies on the pavement. Clubs and flashlights tore eight half-dollar-sized chunks of flesh away from his shins and legs, causing permanent circulatory damage.

“The mood of the crowd was--they could not believe something like this could happen this close to their home,” Larry Rossi, a mechanic at a nearby auto shop, told a Norwalk Superior Court jury.

Jurors took 30 minutes to find the trucker not guilty in September, 1987. They concluded, two of them said in recent interviews, that Willbanks was telling the truth and that Deputy Ferri was not.

Juror Donald Stephenson, a retired aerospace engineer, said he thinks Ferri overreacted to the exhausted trucker’s initial refusal to move his rig, then joined other deputies in concocting a story to cover themselves.

“It appeared to me,” Stephenson said, “that they beat this poor kid so much that they had to do something.”

Both Stephenson and juror Aaron Sandler, an aerospace engineer in Seal Beach, said they found part of Ferri’s testimony absurd. The deputy said that when he pulled Willbanks from the cab, they both landed on their feet, then Willbanks stepped toward him, forcing the officer to smash him in the face with a flashlight.

Four witnesses said they saw the trucker drop out of the cab and immediately collapse onto the pavement.

Deputies said that Willbanks, though face down, continued to struggle for several minutes more.

“As I approached the suspect, I observed him to lift up (push up) off the ground, lifting the deputies (who were) on his back,” wrote Deputy Bruce Prewett in his report. Prewett then struck Willbanks “two or three times with my PR-24 baton in the small of the back in an attempt to terminate his attack on the deputies.” Independent witnesses said they saw nothing to indicate the trucker was fighting back.

Jurors Sandler and Stephenson said testimony persuaded them that the officers should have been punished, not the trucker.

Deputies are entitled to use reasonable and necessary force when subduing a suspect. Prosecutor Bozanich said the actions by the officers met that standard. “It just took a lot to subdue (Willbanks). . . . It didn’t seem to be obvious excessive force.”

Court records show that Ferri, who joined the Sheriff’s Department in 1977, was accused of assault in six lawsuits between 1979 and 1987. Three ended in cash settlements totaling $193,000 and two are pending. At least four other formal complaints have been lodged against him, but the dispositions are not revealed under state privacy laws.

Prewett has been named in two other excessive-force lawsuits since 1986, with one settled in February for $60,000 and the other pending. He was fired in 1984 after his supervising sergeant testified that the deputy had beaten a burglary suspect unnecessarily and filed a false report about the incident. He was reinstated several months later after a judge dismissed the criminal case, declared Prewett innocent of felony assault and removed the case file from court records--all over the strenuous objections of the prosecutor.

Bozanich, a top prosecutor who usually argues murder cases, does not apologize for trying Willbanks, or for the conduct of the deputies.

“It strikes me the guy is going to make more than two years of my salary (from the settlement),” Bozanich said. “That’s $6,000 a stitch. . . . I think the taxpayers got taken for a ride.”

Willbanks disagrees. He was fired from his trucking job because of the incident, and says he still has pounding headaches and severe leg swelling and numbness that prevent him from driving a truck.

The incident also changed how he views law enforcement officers.

“Just because they have a badge on,” Willbanks said, “doesn’t mean there’s not a criminal behind it.”