Teachers Question CYA Investigation of Near-Fatal Stabbing

Staff at the California Youth Authority’s juvenile prison in Camarillo failed to prevent a near-fatal stabbing last April, then cut short an investigation of the incident to keep a state legislator from learning about it, a group of prison school employees has charged.

The teachers’ allegations of a failure in internal security and a subsequent cover-up were made first to Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara) last spring. His office passed the matter to the CYA in Sacramento because it lacked enough staff for an investigation, said Hart aide Beverly O’Gorman.

The CYA investigation that ended last August found the staff at the Ventura School had done nothing incorrectly, Sara Andrade, a CYA spokeswoman, said last week. But one of four teachers who discussed the incident with The Times challenged the impartiality of the CYA investigation.

“That was like asking the fox to guard the henhouse,” said Benjamin Talley, a prison librarian who contends he has been unable to work at the facility since witnessing the stabbing.

Talley and three CYA teachers who asked not to be identified because of possible reprisals said in interviews that CYA officials knew in advance there would be trouble last April 26, yet did not take action to stop two inmates from stabbing 19-year-old Filemon Hernandez with a makeshift knife.

They also charged that Ventura School officials shortened the lock-down period and search that follow an inmate assault to just 2 1/2 hours, then ordered inmates back to class so the school would appear normal for a tour by Assemblyman Willard H. Murray Jr. (D-Paramount). In a more thorough search, guards later found two makeshift knives near the crime scene, the teachers said.

And teachers said that when prison Supt. Manuel Carbajal ordered classes to resume, inmates inadvertently trampled the crime scene and destroyed evidence, stymieing a police investigation and preventing the prosecution of the attackers.

“They really tried to shut this thing up,” one teacher said.

Carbajal has denied the allegations that security failed or that he hurried the usual time allowed for a lock-down and search, adding that his staff correctly handled the participants beforehand and the investigation afterward.

As for the cover-up allegation, he said, “I’m not even going to answer that because it’s absurd. If you think that I’m going to jeopardize the safety of my staff and my wards because an assemblyman’s going to tour the school--those questions don’t even deserve being answered.”

But Carbajal acknowledged that even though his staff knew one of the assailants might cause trouble, they released him from an interrogation to the school grounds moments before he took part in the stabbing.

This is what happened, according to CYA and law enforcement officials:

Hernandez was transferred to the Ventura School on Jan. 30, 1991, after serving time at several other CYA facilities--including the CYA’s Southern Reception Center and Clinic in Norwalk, for burglary and assault.

A 17-year-old youth serving time for sale and possession of cocaine, and Jun Bati, 21, serving time for auto theft, were transferred from the Norwalk juvenile prison to the Ventura School on Dec. 28, 1990, and Feb. 25, 1991, respectively.

Upon arriving, Hernandez began claiming he belonged to a Texas prison gang called the Texas Syndicate.

“This kid was a loudmouth; he would go and start trouble with everybody,” Carbajal said. “He’d been involved in a fight (at another institution) and they sent him over here.”

Carbajal added: “I think what happened is one of the guys he got in a fight with got sent over here.” But Carbajal and CYA officials said there was no truth to the teachers’ allegations that the stabbing was a contract hit.

On April 25, gang information officer Eddie Cue intercepted a letter from the 17-year-old to his girlfriend, another Ventura School inmate.

The youth wrote that he “was going to get into some trouble in the school areas, and that he was going to receive additional time for this,” Carbajal said.

About 8:30 a.m. on April 26, security personnel called the science classroom of teacher Elsie Harms to ask her whether the youth was behaving.

“I said, ‘Yes, is there a problem?’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘No, no problem. Don’t say anything to him.’ ”

At 9:30 a.m., Cue called the youth to his office. He patted him down for weapons, found none and questioned him closely about what trouble he was planning to get into.

“We had no reason to keep the kid out of school,” Carbajal explained, adding that inmates often unjustly accuse each other of planning or committing illegal acts at the prison. “You know, people have due process in institutions, and one of them is the right to education.”

At 10:03, Cue let the youth go back to class.

He then asked chief of security James McDuffy whether the youth should be segregated from the other inmates. McDuffy agreed to do so and dispatched a security officer to retrieve him from class.

Then, at 10:06 a.m., as inmates moved to their third-period classes, two unidentified inmates started a fight to divert the guards.

Seconds later, Bati and the juvenile allegedly chased Hernandez to an area near the flagpole. There, as dozens of other wards looked on, Hernandez was stabbed repeatedly, suffering four shallow wounds in his buttocks and a deep wound to his chest, according to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Within seconds, security guards summoned an ambulance for the badly wounded Hernandez. They collared Bati and the youth, reported retrieving a homemade weapon from one of them, and hustled them in separate vans to a remote, double-locked detention unit far from the school area for questioning.

Security then began a search and began notifying teachers, who were coping with the third-period students arriving in their classrooms.

“We get a call on the intercom, and it says, ‘This is security, dial 81,’ ” said one teacher.

The message was intended to be a way to allow the staff to find out what had happened without alerting the inmates to the stabbing, Carbajal said.

Instead, it caused instant chaos, said one teacher.

“They would have been better off not telling us to call,” he said. “I phoned up and heard 20 people talking all at once, trying to get information.”

The inmates later were ordered by intercom to return in shifts to their cells, which were locked down for 2 1/2 hours so security personnel could search the suspects’ cells and classrooms and the area around the crime scene.

Twenty minutes after the stabbing, the teachers’ supervisor told them that classes would return to normal at fifth period, Talley said.

But the teachers balked, afraid to return to class until they learned what had happened, said Talley, who said he had witnessed the diversionary fight and stabbing from afar.

About 10 teachers demanded that Carbajal brief them on the situation. Shortly after 1 p.m., he met them in a classroom.

“Twice, he asked us to go back to work,” said Talley, who said he has not worked at the prison since a doctor diagnosed the high blood pressure and nervousness he suffered after the stabbing as post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I raised my hand, and he acknowledged me. I said, ‘Mr. Carbajal, some of us don’t feel safe returning to our classes . . . are you asking us, or telling us to return to work?’ ” Talley recalled.

“He said, ‘Those of you who feel comfortable, go. If you don’t, raise your hands.’ I raised my hand, and he said, ‘Talley, meet me afterwards.’ He had security escort me off the grounds” for the remainder of the day.

Classes resumed after 1:30 p.m., and Assemblyman Murray toured the prison, stopping in some classrooms to chat with the inmates and their teachers.

Murray told The Times that he did not learn until several days afterward that anything extraordinary had happened during his visit, the fifth or sixth he had made to CYA facilities where juvenile inmates from Paramount are held.

“There was nothing unusual about my visit,” he said recently. “I wasn’t aware there was any specific schedule for me.”

“I think they were trying, in all honesty, to put a good image across” for the assemblyman, said one of the teachers.

Previously, inmates often were locked down for at least half a day while the staff investigated assaults or gang fights, teachers said.

“Usually when this kind of thing happened . . . you’re shut down until the thing’s kind of investigated,” said another teacher who asked not to be identified. “You shut the damn thing down. I don’t care whether you’ve got a legislator out there or not.”

But Carbajal said there was no such practice.

“That’s their interpretation,” Carbajal said. “That’s not my interpretation of how it is. When you keep kids locked up for something like that, anxiety and depression builds up. You’ve got to get the kids back to a normal program.”

He denied that later searches found more weapons.

Talley and the three teachers who declined to be identified alleged that the swift move to resume classes let inmates disturb the crime scene.

“The Sheriff’s Department . . . was upset because they really did return to a situation where school had gone on as scheduled, and the evidence was destroyed,” one teacher said.

However, Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Harwell said his investigators did not recall that any evidence was destroyed.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. said his office was unable to file charges in the stabbing simply because of problems with eyewitnesses.

“There was insufficient evidence to identify the stabber beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

After the stabbing, about 27 teachers and six aides signed a grievance filed through their union, the California State Employees Assn. (AFL-CIO).

The grievance complained of “Mr. Carbajal’s somewhat cavalier mishandling” of the incident.

It alleged that Carbajal’s administration failed to ensure the teachers’ safety and violated past security practices by sending inmates back to class so quickly. It also accused Carbajal of ejecting Talley from school grounds to push them back to work, and it alleged that the quick search failed to find two more weapons hidden near the crime scene.

The grievance, they said, was never satisfactorily answered.

But Carbajal said his office agreed to meet with teachers to discuss their concerns about safety and other issues.

The teachers and their boss met on Sept. 12 at the urging of O’Gorman, Sen. Hart’s aide.

Carbajal remembers they complained about not having enough class preparation time, classroom time and bathroom breaks because they must wait for hundreds of inmates to move to classes through two metal detectors.

“I feel very confident that the issues have been dealt with,” Carbajal said.

But two veteran teachers said that Carbajal often seems insensitive to the inmates’ need for education, and they said he has not answered teachers’ pleas for a greater emphasis on teaching rather than punishing the inmates.

“I think he’s tried to make it as uncomfortable for the kids as possible,” said one, who asked not to be named.

“Security,” Carbajal concluded, “is No. 1 here.”