Deputy Broke 3 Rules in Killing, County Says : Hearing: Civil Service panel hears ex-officer’s appeal of his firing over fatal shooting of 15-year-old in 1991.

A county attorney told a Civil Service Commission hearing Monday that it would be dangerous to grant a sheriff’s deputy’s appeal of his firing for showing “deplorable” lack of judgment and “disregard of life” in the fatal 1991 shooting of a Montebello youth.

Senior Deputy County Counsel Dixon M. Holston declared that evidence in the slaying of 15-year-old David Angel Ortiz shows that Deputy Jose Belmares, 30, “should not be back out on the streets with a gun and the power of life and death.”

With Ortiz’s parents, two sisters and other relatives sitting in the hearing room, Holston said that a meticulous investigation by the Sheriff’s Department found that Belmares violated at least three departmental rules when he shot the youth in the back. The deputy said he thought Ortiz might be armed.

But Belmares’ attorney, Richard Shinee, lead counsel for the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, told the panel that the discharged deputy was the victim of a political proceeding.

Shinee said there have been 300 other cases of shootings by deputies in which no one was fired.

Ortiz was shot in a gang-infested neighborhood of Artesia where law enforcement officers are properly in fear of their lives, the attorney said. Belmares had to “act in a split-second moment,” and the decision to fire him was “pure and simple politics,” he added.

The proceedings before hearing officer Michael Prihar are expected to run into next week, after which Prihar will send the full county commission a written opinion on Belmares’ plea for reinstatement.

The Ortiz slaying was one of four controversial fatal shootings by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in a one-month period in the summer of 1991.

Two deputies were fired and their immediate supervisor demoted in one of the other cases, and the furor over all four led to the inquiry by retired Judge James G. Kolts that found a pattern of excessive force in the department.

Of the four slayings, the Ortiz shooting has gotten the most attention. A U.S. attorney’s investigation into possible prosecution of Belmares for allegedly violating Ortiz’s civil rights has dragged on for more than a year.

The Ortiz family’s attorney, Miguel F. Garcia, has been critical of the slow pace of the inquiry. But Garcia said Monday that he would just as soon it be continued until a new U.S. attorney in Los Angeles can be appointed by Bill Clinton’s Administration.

Ortiz was shot late at night after a high-speed chase. Belmares said he first fired a shot at the boy to prevent him from backing his car into the deputy’s car, and then fired four more shots because he thought the youth might be armed.

In a letter notifying the deputy that he had been fired, Undersheriff Robert A. Edmonds said Belmares brought “discredit and embarrassment” to himself and the department by improper use of deadly force.

In his opening statement Monday, Holston said the deputy violated departmental rules by shooting in what may have been a misdemeanor; that even if Belmares though Ortiz was a fleeing felon, he still was not entitled to shoot unless his own life was in danger; and that there was no probable cause for him to believe Ortiz posed a danger to him.