2 Police Forces Are at Odds in Lawsuit Over Beating of Man

No one, it seems, wants credit for taking Eddie Joe Hewitt into custody.

Los Angeles police detectives say they didn’t do it. Inglewood police officers say they didn’t do it. Hewitt, a convict with a long and violent record, says one of the two--and perhaps both--did it. And, he says, they beat him bloody in the process.

Seven years after Hewitt, then wanted in connection with a double murder and three armed robberies, was dragged out from his hiding place under a pickup truck, jury selection is set to begin Tuesday in his federal civil rights lawsuit. No one denies that he was injured at the hands of police, although his lawyer will have to prove his contention that the rough handling was unjustified.

The real fight, however, has been going on for months, and has had less to do with Hewitt than with the two police departments.

Officers from one department have never directly accused officers from the other of beating Hewitt, 32. But the fact that the two agencies were the only ones present and that each says the other apprehended Hewitt should convince a jury that “something bad happened,” said Hewitt’s attorney, Donald W. Cook. “One thing that’s clear: We’ve got cops who are lying.”

Adding to the unseemly appearance of the inter-agency duel is a bizarre disagreement over the roles of the only two women officers at the scene.

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One of the highest ranking members of the Inglewood department, a captain, has testified in court documents that he saw a female LAPD officer struggling with, and possibly striking, Hewitt. When shown a photograph of the officer, Hewitt also fingered her as one of his assailants.

But Hewitt’s own attorney says he now believes both his client and the captain are wrong. The female officer who was beating Hewitt, Cook contends, was the Inglewood captain’s wife, herself an Inglewood officer, although Cook also says LAPD officers might have been involved.

An Inglewood officer, who was later fired in a sports-betting shake-up at the department, has alleged that the captain turned off his flashlight so onlookers could not see his wife beat Hewitt.

The husband and wife have repeatedly denied those allegations under oath.

Regardless of what happened that night, an otherwise routine police brutality suit has left the two cities “at each other’s throats,” in the words of Cook.

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And the primary beneficiary of the rare fight could well prove to be Hewitt, a high school dropout serving two terms of 25 years to life for manslaughter.

Answers to many questions are in dispute: Who was standing where, and when; who was in plainclothes and who in uniform; why the captain turned off his flashlight.

But there is no disagreement over how it began the night of May 16, 1989: Hewitt was wanted for the two killings for which he is now serving time, and he was cruising the streets of Los Angeles in a stolen BMW.

At first he was unaware that LAPD plainclothes detectives who had received a tip were tailing him. When he did recognize that police were behind him, at about 9 p.m., Hewitt made a sharp turn, hit the gas and sped away. The detectives gave chase, other units joining them.

Near the intersection of Regent Street and Inglewood Avenue in Inglewood, Hewitt crashed his speeding car into a parked van and fled on foot. Dressed in a blue and white sweatsuit and sneakers, he spent the next two hours lying on his stomach under a pickup truck, listening as an LAPD helicopter and dozens of police officers hunted for him.

A short time after Hewitt disappeared among the houses and apartment buildings, according to police reports and interviews, an Inglewood officer happened upon the LAPD detectives as they combed the area. When he learned that the detectives were searching for a murder suspect, one who often carried a gun, he put out an urgent call for assistance.

Among the three dozen Inglewood officers responding to that call were Capt. James Seymour, the second in command of the Inglewood department, and his wife, Diane Seymour, who had just completed training as a K-9 officer. Neither was on duty at the time of the call, but both responded from home, they have said, so that Diane Seymour’s new police dog could experience the noise, lights and confusion of a nighttime manhunt.

The officers set up a perimeter to keep Hewitt from slipping away. Two K-9 search teams from Inglewood set out to probe the backyards and bushes as the helicopter painted the neighborhood with a 30-million-candlepower spotlight.

Diane Seymour, now a detective in Inglewood, left her dog in the car and joined the search team of Inglewood Sgt. John Bell as a backup officer, she said in a deposition.

After two hours, Bell’s dog sniffed Hewitt under the pickup, which was parked in the shadows of a carport.

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Bell unleashed his German shepherd and sent the snarling animal under the truck. The dog clamped its jaws around Hewitt’s leg and, according to police reports from both agencies, Hewitt began striking the animal in the face with a windshield wiper to get it to release its hold.

This is where the stories diverge, where the “unified defense” that the two cities had once planned to present to the jury splinters. And as the attorney for Inglewood, Robert John Chavez, told U.S. District Court Judge John G. Davies last week, “There is going to be a lot of finger-pointing.”

Hewitt, who was not armed that night, contends that one of the officers told him to “turn the dog loose before I kill you,” and that the beating began shortly thereafter--while he was handcuffed. An African American, Hewitt also contends that officers hurled racial slurs.

The LAPD detectives say they were in the city of Inglewood, and so the search was conducted by Inglewood police. They were well away from the pickup, they say, when Hewitt emerged, and only took custody of him later.

Inglewood officers say that LAPD detectives were right there, and apprehended the suspect. But they have also said the officers never beat Hewitt.

Diane Seymour says she was still in a nearby yard, which the dog team had just searched.

Until last year, Hewitt’s lawyer Cook, as well as the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, believed that it was LAPD officers who first grabbed Hewitt, court records indicate. And at that time, the case was centered solely on the question of whether Hewitt was intentionally battered.

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Hewitt said that at least some of the officers who pummeled him were dressed in the plainclothes outfit of jeans and a “raid” jacket; all the LAPD detectives were clad in plainclothes, and at that time no one knew of any Inglewood officers who were dressed similarly. Hewitt also identified two LAPD detectives, including Emma Ramirez, as being among those who grabbed him.

(Ramirez says she didn’t contact Hewitt until she drove him to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, where doctors sutured his split left ear and a gash over his right eye and treated him for multiple bruises across his back and dog bites to his left hand, left hip and left ankle.)

Additionally, in an internal memo filed two days after the incident, Bell, the Inglewood dog handler, wrote that although the LAPD detectives had been ordered to stay at the command post during the search, they had rushed in and apprehended Hewitt after the dog found him. “Due to [the dog’s] struggle and my attempting to assist, I had no time to turn my attention to directing the LAPD officers’ movements.”

Senior Assistant City Atty. Dan Woodard, head of the civil liability division, declined to comment.

When the LAPD detectives learned last year of Inglewood’s story that it was LAPD officers who had wrestled with Hewitt, they “went ballistic,” a source said.

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The Los Angeles city attorney’s office, Cook and a private defense lawyer representing one LAPD detective all now allege that Inglewood has willfully attempted to suppress the names of officers at the scene, has failed to turn over documents and has sought to cover up details of the incident--including the fact that many of the Inglewood officers were dressed in the same type of plainclothes outfits as the LAPD officers.

The reason for the alleged cover-up, they say, is that a high-ranking Inglewood officer and his wife--both of whom were dressed in plainclothes--were involved.

“Absolutely not true,” said Inglewood attorney Chavez. “That’s ludicrous. If you were accused of beating someone up, as LAPD is, wouldn’t your best defense be, ‘Hey, we weren’t even there’?”

James Seymour said that after running to where Hewitt had been caught, he shined his flashlight onto officers, and a female officer wearing a raid jacket turned to him and told him to “turn the f------ light off.” He complied.

Seymour said several times that the woman who spoke was not his wife.

At one point in his deposition, he says he believes the officer may have wanted the light off because it was “backlighting” her and other officers, and thereby allowing Hewitt to see where they were. At another time, Seymour said there may have been a different reason for the shouted demand.

Cook: “Did you think that maybe she wanted the light off so she could get in some punches or blows to the suspect?”

Seymour: “Did I think that was a possibility? Yes, I thought that was a possibility.”

Further clouding the case is the relationship between the Seymours and the primary accuser.

The only person who says he actually witnessed Diane Seymour strike Hewitt is former Inglewood officer Rick Freeman. Freeman was an 11-year veteran with several commendations when, in 1994, he and 14 other officers were implicated in a station house sports-wagering operation.

He pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge and was fired--the only officer to lose his job. James Seymour recommended the firing.

In an interview, James Seymour called the cover-up allegations “a total and complete lie. I think [Freeman] is expressing his animosity because I’m the one who recommended he be fired.”

Chavez questioned why, if his allegations are true, Freeman waited so long to come forward.

Freeman, in an interview, said he never wanted to come forward.

“I didn’t go to anyone,” he said. “I have been sought out by the city of Los Angeles to tell the truth. And that’s what I intend to do.”

The trial is expected to last eight days.