Deputy’s Use of Gun Called Unwarranted : Law enforcement: Officer violated use-of-force rules three times in death of fleeing suspect, supervisor tells Civil Service panel. The deputy is fighting dismissal.

Deputy Jose Belmares had no objective reason for using deadly force against a 15-year-old Montebello youth he shot and killed in 1991, Assistant Sheriff Raymon Morris testified Tuesday.

“Our policy states very clearly that we don’t shoot fleeing suspects,” Morris, one of the four highest-ranking officials in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, told a Civil Service Commission hearing on a motion for reinstatement by the discharged deputy.

The assistant sheriff was the officer responsible for recommending that Belmares be fired after the shooting. Morris sharply rebutted suggestions by the deputy’s attorney that actions by the slain youth, David Angel Ortiz, gave Belmares and his partner, Deputy Robert Orona, any reasonable basis for thinking Ortiz was armed and about to shoot them.

“Nothing was articulated by the deputies (in our investigation) that would justify the kind of force they used,” Morris said.

Orona, who did not fire the fatal shots, was briefly suspended after the incident.

Morris emphasized in Tuesday’s testimony that the encounter between Belmares and Ortiz actually involved three separate shooting episodes by the deputy and that all of them were in violation of Sheriff’s Department shooting policies.

First, he said, investigation showed that Belmares fired one shot when he saw that Ortiz was backing his automobile into the deputy’s radio car. Ortiz’s car was only going 5 or 6 m.p.h. at the time, Belmares and Orona were outside their car and in no danger and it is contrary to departmental policy to fire warning shots in any case, Morris said.

Later, after the chase was resumed and Ortiz was stopped a second time, Belmares violated departmental policy by shooting at Ortiz several times as he fled. He violated policy a third time by firing a round at a companion of Ortiz simply because he was moving around on the ground.

Belmares’ attorney, Richard Shinee of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, suggested that because the incidents took place in a gang-ridden neighborhood of Artesia late at night, Belmares would have a reasonable fear that Ortiz would have been armed, and that fear would have made the deputy reasonably quicker to shoot.

Morris bluntly disputed Shinee’s contention. “It is not reasonable to consider persons armed simply because the neighborhood is dangerous,” Morris said.

To suggestions by Shinee that the Sheriff’s Department is varying its discipline of deputies involved in controversial shootings, and that the department treated Belmares more severely than other deputies in similar cases, Morris acknowledged that the department is investigating shootings much more carefully than it once did and may be enforcing its shooting policy more stringently.

The assistant sheriff explained that public and press concern about shootings has grown. He said that in 1989 the department created a shooting evaluation committee of high-ranking officers to more carefully review shootings.

The hearing will be continued next month.