Brothers Detail ’78 Beating Similar to Fuhrman Tapes : Police: Ex-detective’s account rekindles memories of ‘living hell’ for trio. They say LAPD didn’t interview them.

Former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman shocked the nation with audiotaped boasts that he and other officers pounded suspects’ faces to “mush,” pushed them down stairs and left their blood-splattered apartment in ruins after two of his partners were shot.

But for Albert Morales, those graphic claims of police abuse rekindled personal memories of what he describes as a night of “living hell.” Morales, 37, now a drug rehabilitation and gang diversion counselor, believes he and his brothers Benny and Michael were victims of a brutal reign of terror that police launched after the Nov. 18, 1978, shooting of two officers at the Pico Gardens housing project.

The bloody beatings described in separate Times interviews with the Morales brothers and detailed in a 1978 letter that an Eastside public agency lawyer wrote demanding an official investigation match many aspects of the account given by Fuhrman in taped interviews with an aspiring screenwriter.

The Morales brothers say they were never interviewed by LAPD investigators who conducted an 18-month probe of the incident at the time--nor have they been contacted since. Now, the Fuhrman tapes have prompted new investigations, and the brothers’ story puts them at the center of the controversy.

The memories are still vivid. In measured words, a somber Albert Morales told his story:

“They started taking turns, hitting me with flashlights and clubs from all directions,” he alleged in an interview last week. “I could feel the heat of the blood dripping down my face and the back of my neck.”

Morales said he braced his hands against both sides of a walled stairwell, as the officers tried to shove him down the stairs. “You f------ Mexican! F------ cholo! We got your ass!” he said they shouted, pounding his body with their fists and clubs.

Officers Are Attacked

The 1978 letter written by the Eastside lawyer asked state and federal officials to investigate, charging that the Morales brothers and other residents were battered by police in a series of incidents that began with the shooting of the two officers. Of the various officers who allegedly participated in the beatings, only one was named in the letter: Fuhrman.

Los Angeles Police Department officials said Friday that a review of Fuhrman and his taped comments was just beginning and that several investigations would be launched. The U.S. Justice Department also is looking into the incident.

Fuhrman, whose grisly statements dominated recent events in the O.J. Simpson trial, declined to comment last week when called to court, invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Fuhrman’s civil attorney, Richard P. Towne, declined to comment Friday because he said a motion by the Simpson defense team has prevented him from reviewing the statements contained in the tapes. Fuhrman’s criminal attorney, Darryl Mounger, was unavailable for comment Friday.

The Morales brothers’ story puts a human face on some of the most violent incidents Fuhrman alluded to in the tapes and suggests that the retired detective was telling the truth instead of fabricating details to impress a would-be screenwriter. This is their tale:

On the afternoon of Nov. 17, 1978, the guys from Pico Gardens, a series of two-story pillbox-like units tucked along 5th Street in Boyle Heights between an industrial area and the Santa Ana Freeway, played a football game with young men from another Eastside neighborhood. Afterward, Benny Morales said, a number of the Pico Gardens residents stayed outside drinking beer.

Officers Dean Brinker and Alf R. Anderson of the nearby Hollenbeck Division were patrolling the housing project about 12:45 a.m. when they spotted a group of young men in a parking lot on 5th Street.

The officers were attacked with bottles and then were shot at after they got out of their squad car to chase one of those suspected of hurling objects. The suspect ran inside an apartment on 5th Street, according to a report by the district attorney’s office, which probed the shooting.

With a crowd of residents around the officers, the report said, Brinker was shot in the left forearm; Anderson was hit twice in the buttocks. Also wounded in the back was resident Juan Ramirez, who was struggling with Brinker while being placed under arrest.

Both Brinker and Anderson have declined to comment on the incident.

Benny Morales, who was standing on his porch, also on 5th Street, acknowledged that objects were thrown, but he says that was only after the officers confronted residents who were drinking and began pushing one of them around. Morales said he and two friends ran inside his apartment and heard about four gunshots.

He and the friends, Jesse Leyba and Mike Vasquez, looked out the living room window and saw officers pointing to his apartment building, Morales said.

“The cops came with the billy clubs and instead of knocking on the door they tried to pound it open,” said Morales, 35.

“I was going to open it,” he said. “But I was scared that if I opened the door, they were going to get me like they were getting the door.”

The door crashed open. “When they came in, they started swinging clubs,” Morales said. “They stabbed me in the stomach with the billy club so hard it knocked the air out of me.”

He said police dragged him outside by his arms and threw him face-down on the grass, ordering him not to look up. He and Leyba were later put into a patrol car, where an officer hit Leyba in the groin with a flashlight, Morales said.

Upstairs, Albert Morales, asleep with his girlfriend, was awakened by the crash of the living room door being knocked down, he said.

“Come on down! Come on down with your hands up!” he said officers downstairs shouted. The commands, he recalled, were followed by what he took to be the metallic sounds of weapons being cocked.

He said he told his girlfriend to get dressed and tried to put on his pants in the dark bedroom, illuminated only by the light from a police helicopter circling overhead. He said an officer burst into the room, grabbed his girlfriend by the hair and appeared to use her as a shield for himself and other officers--a tactic described by Fuhrman.

“I saw a revolver pointing in my face,” Morales said.

Dressed in boxer shorts, Morales said, he raised his hands in the air. He then felt what he believes was a club strike his head. “The first hit I saw stars. The second hit I felt blood coming down my face,” he said. “I just tensed my body up because I knew what was coming next.”

‘Like a Scene Out of a Movie’

He said the officers dragged him out of the bedroom to the head of the stairs, striking him about “30 to 40 times from all directions” with clubs, flashlights and fists.

As they struck him, Morales said, the officers were also trying to push him down the stairs. An officer grabbed his leg and pulled him down the stairs, he said.

He was handcuffed on the porch outside, where he viewed the unfolding action.

“It was like a scene out of a movie,” Albert Morales said. He explained that officers were running around the area, shouting at residents. Squad cars were everywhere, their red lights flashing. And the helicopter still buzzed overhead.

“I remember a blow to the back of my head,” he recalled. “I remember a second blow, and the lights went out.”

Morales said he regained consciousness as he lay handcuffed face-down on the grass. He was taken to the Hollenbeck station. “Who shot the officers?” he said police asked him.

Morales said he passed out again, awoke at County-USC Medical Center and then was booked into County Jail. A Sheriff’s Department prisoner release form shows that Morales was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime and released at 11:45 p.m. Nov. 18. The charges against Morales were dropped Nov. 27, the document shows.

Meanwhile, Benny Morales said he, Leyba and Vasquez were taken to the dimly lighted basement of the Hollenbeck station on Nov. 18.

“Who did the shooting?” he said officers demanded. Morales said he was blinded by a flashlight that was shined in his eyes.

He said he was hit in the stomach with a fist. “Don’t look up,” he said an officer ordered. Morales said he heard his friends moan while they were apparently hit. “They were throwing us around like rag dolls,” Morales said.

He said officers checked his and the friends’ hands with a light used to detect traces of gunpowder, but found none.

Morales said he was released about 3 a.m. without being charged and walked home. The “house was upside down. It was a total disaster,” he said. He said he saw bloody handprints on both sides of the stairwell. Vases were smashed; furniture was overturned.

“From [Albert’s] room upstairs there was blood to the front porch, sidewalk and on the street,” he said. “There was blood everywhere.”

In transcripts of his taped conversations with aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny, Fuhrman described an apartment that had “blood everywhere--all the walls, all the furniture, all the floor. It was just everywhere. . . .”

The Morales brothers said the next two days were filled with tension as officers cruised the projects. On Nov. 20, Michael Morales said, as he stood outside with his father and other residents, several squad cars arrived. Among the officers, he said, was Fuhrman.

“A lot of the guys pointed him out and said he’s one of the guys who came inside the house,” said Morales, who had returned home that day from a funeral in San Jose. “I remember his face perfectly well.”

Morales alleges that on Nov. 20 an officer hit him in the buttocks with a club for no apparent reason. He got up and ran but said the officers caught him about two blocks away, hogtied him and threw him face-down in the back of a patrol car that had its window smashed.

In the back of the Hollenbeck station, Morales said, he was punched and kicked by Fuhrman and other officers.

Morales said the officers demanded that he tell him who had shot their partners. “Unless you give us a name, we’re going to arrest you for conspiracy to kill a police officer!” he said they shouted.

Inside the station, he claims two other residents were taken to the basement and were dragged back up by officers a short while later.

“They were coming up pretty red. . . . They looked winded,” said Morales, 38.

Frightened, Morales said, he gave the officers a fake name, saying he heard that a guy called “Christopher” had shot at the officers. He said they let him go.

In transcripts of his interviews, Fuhrman talks of beating suspects in the basement as the best way to interrogate them.

In the Dec. 5, 1978, letter written by Eastside attorney Antonio Rodriguez, he says Michael Morales and another resident were forced to sit on the broken glass Nov. 20 in the patrol car and “were assaulted [and] battered by several officers, including one by the name of Furman [sic].”

Rodriguez, who grew up in Pico Gardens, said he was called about 2 a.m. Nov. 18, 1978, by residents who said police were on a bloody rampage. He drove to the projects but was unable to get past police lines.

His letter asked then-U.S. Atty. Andrea S. Ordin to probe the beatings. The letter was also sent to then Los Angeles Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp. Simpson attorney Johnny L. Cochran Jr., then head of the district attorney’s unit that investigated officer-involved shootings, said last week that the probe focused on the shooting and not the abuse allegations.

Ordin, now a Los Angeles attorney, said Friday that she could not recall the specifics of the federal probe.

In his taped interviews, Fuhrman called himself the primary suspect in an LAPD Internal Affairs Division investigation of 16 officers. “They knew damn well I did it,” he said of LAPD investigators.

But he was cleared of wrongdoing, said Chief Willie L. Williams, who has promised a “biopsy” of Fuhrman’s career.

Cmdr. Tim McBride, LAPD spokesman, said Friday that the probe of Fuhrman is only now beginning. He said two sergeants who were at the scene say Fuhrman’s description of blood splattered everywhere is inaccurate and that no officers used the force described in the tapes.

But Pete Acuna, a watch commander at Hollenbeck that night, said “about 50% of what Fuhrman said sounded true to me.”

“Guys who normally would not step over the line to be brutal, will do so if an officer is shot,” said Acuna, now an attorney. “At the end of a pursuit, a guy would always get beat up. It was normal procedure.”

Acuna, who came to the scene after the incident had occurred, said he saw suspects being “shoved and rousted around” but “within permissible limits.”

He said he did not witness any of the events described by Fuhrman--or by the Morales brothers, who say the incident was one of many involving police brutality at the housing project. But they are not bitter.

“I respect police. I work with police officers and understand how stressful their job is,” said Albert Morales, the anti-gang counselor. “But that was crossing the line.”

Times staff writer Paul Feldman contributed to this story.