In Earlier Cases, Errors Freed Slaying Suspects

Two recent cases in which suspected killers were mistakenly freed from county jails were the result of human error, although the exact cause of one of the incidents is still being debated, authorities said Wednesday.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block presented a report to the Countywide Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee after the County Board of Supervisors ordered the department to investigate the mistakes last month.

“There’s no excuse for an error, but the possibility of an error is certainly there,” Block said.

Neither of the suspects has been rearrested. The incidents occurred within one week’s time this summer.

On July 21, Anait Zakarian, 22, of Glendale, a suspect in the murder of a rival travel agent, was released from the Sybil Brand Institute for Women after a Sheriff’s Department clerk confused her name with that of another inmate.

Five days later, 26-year-old Angel Moya, who allegedly killed a woman during a drunk-driving accident, was freed from the Men’s Central Jail when the district attorney’s office failed to file charges within 48 hours.

The Moya incident is mired in a confused sequence of events in which none of the three law enforcement agencies involved--the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office and the California Highway Patrol--have taken responsibility.

On Wednesday, Block blamed the CHP for Moya’s release.

“It was very simply a failure of the arresting agency, the California Highway Patrol, to file the appropriate documents in a timely manner,” he said.

“There were no charges filed by the D.A. and no record of any county hold,” Block added. “This is not an unusual occurrence. The [Sheriff’s Department] had no reason not to release him.”

But Doug Orr, assistant CHP chief, said the mistake was made by one of the other agencies.

“We did, in fact, file the paperwork with the D.A.’s office,” Orr said. “It is consistent with the practice we always use. This case, for some reason, sat on the desk of the D.A.’s office until the 28th” of July, too late for formal charges to be filed.

The district attorney’s office has also denied that it made a mistake.

“He was arrested and the report was not brought to us until the third day,” said spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. “We did our job.”

Under state law, suspects are freed if they have not been charged within 48 hours.

A final report on the Moya release is scheduled to be finished before the month is out.

In the Zakarian case, Block said Wednesday that a Sheriff’s Department clerk had accidentally “transposed” the booking numbers of Zakarian and inmate Angela Zamora, who both had court appearances on May 22.

According to a Sheriff’s Department report, the clerk “apparently read the wrong booking number [Zamora’s] and entered a 180-day sentence into Zakarian’s records.”

Later, the report said, two other clerks failed to notice that there was no paperwork supporting the 180-day sentence in Zakarian’s files.

In part, the report blames a staffing shortage due to budget cuts for the lapse.