Trial Opens in Suit Over Jail Injury

Chuck Castro admits to a night of heavy drinking on that Monday night in November, 1987. After all, his favorite football team, the Washington Redskins, had won again and he felt like celebrating.

So he threw back half a gallon of beer and a pint of peppermint schnapps and, before long, he was wobbling about downtown Vista banging on cars with his fists until a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy arrived.

But what he didn’t deserve, Castro contends, was to be thrown into a 6-by-6-foot padded cell, allegedly forced to his knees, kicked and rammed into a wall.

The next morning, naked below the waist and writhing in pain, Castro said, he watched as raw sewage backed up from the “Turkish toilet” in the center of the cell.

Just before he was allegedly hit, he remembers telling two sheriff’s deputies at the County Jail in Vista two things: “I’m not going to fight you. I’m a Christian,” and, because he is part American Indian, “You took our land away, what more do you want?”

On Monday, the 40-year-old Oceanside man limped into federal court in San Diego with his wife, Maria, his right arm in a sling and his left hand clutching a cane. The trial of his lawsuit against the county and the three sheriff’s deputies began Monday and is expected to last a week.

Castro is seeking civil damages against Deputies Pat O’Brien, Tom Vrabel and John Alegria, and the county of San Diego for a herniated cervical disk that has left him partly paralyzed.

The deputies’ defense attorney agrees that Castro suffered his spinal injury either in jail or very close to the time he was in sheriff’s custody, but neither the jail staff nor the deputies have any recollection of Castro or how he was hurt.

“Mr. Castro (had) no marks or bruises on him,” Deputy County Counsel Morris G. Hill told the four-man, four-woman jury Monday. As to Castro’s injury, “He could have fallen down. He could have hit the door with his head. He could have sneezed too hard when it happened.”

Attorneys for Castro acknowledged that Castro suffered severe hip, lower back, knee and ankle injuries in 1973 when he fell through a roof during a construction job.

He become addicted to heroin and alcohol to help alleviate the pain, Castro’s attorney said. Castro also was in an auto accident in 1985 that caused minor cuts and bruises.

Heavy drinking before “Monday Night Football” was another way to ease the pain, they said, and prompted his arrest by Alegria, a Vista patrol deputy. Castro was never violent, did not resist arrest and even joked with the deputy as he sat in the back of the squad car, his attorneys claim.

Attorney Christopher Coglianese said Deputies O’Brien and Vrabel, who sat at the defense table in U.S. District Court on Monday, grabbed Castro, “picked him up and threw him forward. They pressed the back of his neck and twisted his head to one side.”

Upon waking up, Castro reportedly cried out in pain, and an inmate in the next cell told him to shut up because, he too, was hurt and was awash in sewage.

A nurse stopped by Castro’s cell and called an ambulance. Paramedics kept his body on a flat board and strapped his head in place. He was taken to Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, where a doctor examined Castro and sent him home about 2:30 p.m. the day after his arrest.

Five hours later, his family sent him back to the hospital. About 14 hours after he first entered the hospital, a second doctor decided he needed immediate surgery on his spinal cord. Castro spent 35 days in the hospital.

But, in the past 4 1/2 years, Castro has been unable to identify the deputies who beat him and told a nurse in the jail at the time that he couldn’t remember being arrested at all.

An “inmate status report” for Castro shows no unusual activity or signs that he struggled with deputies. Even while telling a nurse he could not move, he was moving his arms and legs, said Hill, the county attorney. Nobody, except another inmate who had been arrested for being drunk, recounted the sewage backing up that day.

Hill said Castro has a tendency to exaggerate, saying at various times that he had a “2% chance to live,” that he had been told by a doctor that only three patients in 11 years had survived his type of injury, that his neck had been “crushed” and that he had “bits of broken bone in his neck.”

Castro’s injuries, while serious, were never life-threatening, Hill said, and were not caused by sheriff’s deputies.

“My clients didn’t cause them, and we don’t know who did,” Hill said. “In a nutshell, we don’t know how he got a herniated cervical disk.”

Castro, who lives on disability pay, and his wife are suing for alleged battery, negligence and violation of civil rights. They both sat behind their attorneys’ table Monday as their case was heard.

The incident in Vista is one of several in the past few years in which inmates have claimed abuse.

In January, 1985, former Navy chaplain Jim Butler, 61, said he was beaten by sheriff’s deputies. A Superior Court jury awarded him $1.1 million, and he has since started an organization to deal with victims of alleged brutality by law enforcement officers.

Floyd Craig, an electrical contractor working at the jail, said he was assaulted and strip-searched by deputies four years ago because he wouldn’t move his work tools. He settled a lawsuit with the county for $15,000.

Kimberlee Bryant, 33, a science teacher who was strip-searched and left naked in a padded cell five years ago, was awarded $332,000 by a jury in 1990. And Judy Hejduk, 43, an airline stewardess from Encinitas, said she was chained naked and beaten after being arrested on drunken driving charges. She said she was unable to file a lawsuit because her attorney allowed the statute of limitations to expire.