Suit Claims Deputies Beat Woman During Arrest : Courts: Former X-ray technician is suing officers for $2.7 million after being found not guilty of attacking them.

Four years after a jury found her innocent of attacking sheriff’s deputies, Corin Maldonado is back in court, suing the same deputies for $2.7 million.

Maldonado, 39, of San Gabriel, says she was beaten and hogtied on June 14, 1987, by three deputies called to the Rosemead home of her twin sister to break up a sibling argument.

The alleged beating, coming only six days after kidney surgery, left Maldonado permanently injured and unable to continue working as an X-ray technician, her attorney, Dana Taschner, said.

But the Temple Station deputies--Michael Soop, Patrick Martinez and Kenneth Vogel--give a different story.

They say Maldonado was so enraged and out of control that she spewed obscenities and spittle, hit a deputy on his back hard enough to send him lurching and kicked her bare feet against patrol car windows and the deputies’ thighs before they were able to restrain her.

According to deputies’ reports filed at the Temple Station, when officers asked a scratched and bleeding Maldonado if she had a nickname, she replied: “Yeah, Rocky, for my Italian temper.”

Maldonado was charged with battery on a police officer, a misdemeanor offense. A jury found her not guilty on Feb. 2, 1988, after witnesses disputed the deputies’ account of the fight.

On Wednesday, jurors in Alhambra Municipal Court began hearing testimony in the case, which is expected to continue this week. The lawsuit was sent to Alhambra because of overflow caseloads in Pasadena Superior Court, where it was originally filed.

“There’s a huge disparity between the two versions, as there was at the criminal trial where she was acquitted,” Taschner said during a break in the trial. “It sounds like a different movie.”

But attorney Rod Fick, who represents the deputies, said his clients’ version of events is accurate. It is Maldonado’s that is different, he says.

“She doesn’t look like she did on the day of the incident,” Fick said of the conservatively dressed, quiet, blonde woman, who shook her head in silent denial in court last week as Vogel described her alleged behavior five years ago.

“We categorically deny the charges of excessive force,” Fick said.

Further, Fick said he will call medical experts to testify that Maldonado’s injuries were not as serious as she claims.

The lawsuit, seeking $2.7 million in damages, stems from an argument at 7 p.m. on a Sunday in the driveway of a Rosemead house. Maldonado and her sister, Lorin Diaz, were outside arguing over who should care for a litter of newborn kittens, Taschner said.

The dispute, deputies say, turned into a knockdown, drag-out fight involving at least five other women who took sides and tried to separate the squabbling women. A baby-sitter, who stumbled on the scene as she was returning Maldonado’s daughter and a niece, ran screaming for help to neighbors who summoned deputies.

Vogel, who testified last week, said Maldonado refused to calm down and struck his back when he and Soop waded into the angry group of women. After handcuffing her, Vogel said he put Maldonado in a patrol car. She then kicked at the windows with such force that Vogel and Martinez pulled her out again, bound her feet with a nylon cord and put her back into the car.

Taschner said he plans to call witnesses who will testify that the argument was not violent, as portrayed by the deputies.

“The police are the only ones saying the women touched each other,” he said.