Prison Officer Breaks Silence on May Slaying

In the seven months since inmate Octavio Orozco died at her feet, correctional Lt. Patricia Newton has never wavered from one belief:

The 23-year-old Orozco was killed needlessly, shot in the head by an officer at Pleasant Valley State Prison because he and a handful of other inmates were fighting in the dining hall.

“When I entered the dining hall that night, I entered into a scene that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” said the 43-year-old Newton. “Blood and brain matter were all over the floor, splashed up on the walls. I don’t care if he was an inmate, he was still a human being and he didn’t deserve to be killed. Not for fighting.”

The highest-ranking supervisor to respond to the shooting in May, Newton took a step that few officers have taken in the Department of Corrections. Defying the prison system’s code of silence, she said, she went straight to the warden with her criticism, stating that the officer had made a grave mistake using deadly force to break up a routine fight.

But the warden and other commanding officers believed that the shooting was proper and rejected her opinion outright, she said. After voicing her criticism, she was ostracized and harassed, and several commanding officers then tried to silence her, she said.

The mistreatment continued until she was forced to take a stress leave in June from the San Joaquin Valley prison, she said. She now fears that her 13-year career has effectively come to an end because of the trauma of what she witnessed and the harassment that she says came for challenging the shooting.

“I questioned the shooting in my meeting with the warden that night and I question it to this day. I told the truth and I’ve paid hell for it.”

Last week, the state director of corrections confirmed that a departmental review board, without talking to Newton, recently determined that the shooting was unjustified. The guard who fired the shot in the Orozco case--the most recent killing of an unarmed inmate in the state prison system--had broken policy by using lethal force to stop a fight.

Newton, however, hardly feels vindicated.

“We were all victims of that shooting,” Newton said. “I feel for the family of inmate Orozco and I feel for the guard who shot him, because the decisions he made are split-second ones that are easy to second-guess.”

Breaking the Code

Newton’s decision to go to the warden and now talk to The Times is rare among prison guards. Not even officers at Corcoran State Prison, who reported set-up fights and shootings that resulted in indictments, went to the warden or media until months after the incidents.

But even as Newton challenged the shooting inside Pleasant Valley that night in May, she had misgivings about sharing the information with outside law enforcement agencies.

She contends that her commanding officers questioned the need for her to write a report and discouraged her from talking to Fresno County sheriff’s deputies investigating the homicide. Newton said she muzzled herself, not providing any details or opinions about the incident to investigators.

Newton’s story underscores the ambivalence that prison guards feel when they choose whether to “tattle on the family.” They say the code of silence isn’t some nebulous shadow, but a real force of intimidation that helps further conceal a world already behind walls. Female guards say it is even harder for them to break ranks because the last thing they want is to give weight to the stereotype that female officers cannot hang tough with the men.

Corrections Director Cal Terhune confirmed that Pleasant Valley Warden Gail Lewis has argued consistently that the shooting was proper. But the department’s shooting review board weighed varying accounts, he said, and determined that the gun post officer had overreacted by using deadly force to stop a brawl.

Terhune said he won’t make a final decision on discipline until after the Fresno County district attorney’s office completes a criminal investigation.

Terhune had pledged in an April memo to wardens throughout the state that he would not tolerate retaliation against any officer who reported abuse or wrongdoing. He said questions from The Times about the treatment of Newton have now prompted his department to investigate whether prison officials retaliated against Newton for challenging the shooting.

Terhune acknowledged that Warden Lewis had failed to inform top corrections officials in Sacramento about Newton’s criticisms or a memo outlining attempts to harass and silence her. Warden Lewis did not return repeated phone calls from The Times.

“There are several questions, several serious questions, that I’m looking at,” Terhune said. “The issue about the treatment of the lieutenant is one.”

A Deadly Policy

Orozco, who was serving a nine-year sentence for drug dealing, is one of 39 inmates to die during the past decade as a result of California’s controversial practice of shooting at prisoners engaged in fistfights and melees. Corrections officials recently pledged to end the practice.

As in many of the shootings, Orozco and the inmates in the dining hall were not carrying weapons nor causing any serious injuries, according to official incident reports. No staffer faced immediate peril.

Orozco had joined the fight late, if at all, various reports show. The gun post officer didn’t wait for fellow guards in the dining hall to try to break up the brawl with batons or pepper spray. He never fired a woodblock warning shot. His first response was the most deadly response.

The failure to follow these required steps--the same failures that Newton said she pointed out on the night of the shooting--were factors in the review board’s finding, corrections officials said.

Officers who worked with Newton when she was at Wasco State Prison in the early 1990s say she is no malcontent. They recall how she stood up to tremendous pressure and racism when she and Travis Newton, a black correctional captain, decided to marry. The interracial couple endured months of ugly phone calls and notes.

Last week, surrounded by her husband, attorney and psychologist, a tearful Newton said her biggest fear wasn’t further harassment for publicly taking on the department. She said her greatest concern was that her story would be used to discredit prison guards.

“There are thousands of officers who go to work every day. They don’t go to work saying, ‘I’m going to bag an inmate today.’ They go to work with all the ethics and honesty. They are proud of their uniform, proud of that badge. They are the kind of person you’d want to have as your next door neighbor.

“They go to work and do that job every day. And every day you do a job like that, a piece of you is taken. So these people are heroes, silent heroes every day.”

Newton says that May 7 started out as just such a routine day. She was the watch commander on third shift, from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Halfway through the evening, a distressed male voice came crackling over the radio. He was requesting medical assistance. Something terribly wrong had occurred in the Facility A food hall.

It took her three minutes to run over from her office, she recalled. Everything turned slow-motion for her. An eerie, numb silence had fallen over the dining hall. Officers were staggering around in a fog, she said, food trays everywhere. Eighty inmates lay flat on the ground, bits of brain scattered before some of them. Along the railing, three inmate fighters, one black and two Latino, were handcuffed. Just a few inches away was a prostrate Orozco, gurgling for air.

Newton took one look and gasped. She is certain now that she went numb for a moment, but then her training took over. She noticed that the incident scene was being contaminated. One officer was tracking footprints through the blood.

The lieutenant in charge of the facility, J. Smith, seemed dazed, Newton said, so she began barking orders: yellow tape to cordon off the scene, plastic flex-cuffs to restrain the inmates, someone to replace the officer in the gun booth above.

She said she looked up and saw the guard who had fired the fatal bullet. Officer Bruce Brumana was transfixed, white-knuckling his high-powered rifle. She said she summoned the staff psychological-trauma team. The team would later counsel not only guards but inmates who had trouble sleeping after seeing Orozco.

“Everyone was in shock,” she said. “Anyone with any feelings would be in shock.”

Twenty minutes had passed. The facility lieutenant, who Newton said now appeared clearheaded, took over the reins. An ambulance arrived and transported Orozco’s body to an outside hospital. Newton gathered more details about the fight and the shooting. She then went back to her office to notify her superiors and the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department and district attorney.

She returned to the dining hall a half-hour later and noticed that Brumana was still at his post. She again ordered a replacement and asked that his Ruger Mini 14 rifle be taken into evidence. When a new gun post officer finally did arrive, Newton said, a facility sergeant wanted to accompany Brumana to the counseling office so he could “lend support and help Brumana write his report.”

Newton said she was worried that this would compromise the investigation and told the sergeant no. When he became angry, “I had to give him a direct order,” she said.

Newton said she debriefed one dining hall officer who had witnessed the entire incident. He told her he was approaching the combatants to break up the fight when he saw the glint of Brumana’s rifle and quickly moved out of the line of fire. He said the brawl began as a one-on-one fight between a black inmate and a Latino, and escalated into a small melee with up to a dozen inmates punching and kicking each other.

Escalation of Violence

Orozco, an 18th Street gang member from Baldwin Park, was not one of the original combatants. No warning shot had been fired. The black inmate whose life was said to be in danger--Brumana’s stated reason for firing the deadly shot--had only a scrape.

“The first rule in a [fight] is you go up the ladder of force. You go from shouts to whistle to alarm to baton to warning shots and then to deadly force. Not the other way around,” Newton said.

When it came time to brief the warden and two captains, Newton said, she didn’t hold back in her assessment. Warden Lewis was standing in the hall outside her office. As Newton recited all the reasons why the shooting appeared to be unjustified, she said, Warden Lewis turned angry and questioned her credibility

“She said, ‘That’s not the information I just received from Lt. Smith,’ who was the lieutenant I had to take over for. Then she turned around and walked away and left me standing there in front of the two captains. I couldn’t respond.”

In an official memo to Warden Lewis three weeks later, Newton complained that one of the captains, Anthony Malfi, then began to browbeat her. “Captain Malfi sarcastically proceeded to chastise and interrogate me regarding my involvement/actions in the incident,” Newton wrote in her May 25 memo. “[He] then questioned the need for me to submit a written report in regard to my involvement.”

A few minutes after her meeting with the warden, she told The Times, the captain became loud and aggressive and questioned why she even entered the dining hall that night. The captain, she said, also became enraged when she wanted to change a few lines in her report. She said she found herself intimidated, eliminating anything of controversy in her written account.

Another captain suggested that she go home and not wait around to be questioned by a sheriff’s homicide detective, she said.

A sergeant, one of her subordinates, then confronted her and said if he had to do it all over again, he would have kicked her out of the dining hall that night.

The Times contacted the prison three times for comment by the warden and others on the incident. But the calls were not returned.

Newton said their intent was clear. They wanted her to keep her mouth shut. When the sheriff’s investigator did approach her early the next morning, Newton answered only a basic question or two and didn’t volunteer anything.

“I was walking on eggshells. After that, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I told myself, ‘I’m just going to come to my job every day and do my job.’ ”

Newton said one captain wrote and circulated a memo that stated that watch commanders were no longer allowed to intervene at incident scenes. She said the memo did not mention her by name, but everyone knew to whom it was directed.

“Suddenly, people I never had a problem with started chewing me out for nothing. It was pretty rough. But as a woman, I told myself I couldn’t show emotion. You hide yourself in the bathroom and cry it out and kick the walls and do whatever it takes to come back out and be Miss Professional.”

But she said it wasn’t that easy. She tried to suppress the scene in the dining hall, but the image of Orozco wouldn’t go away. She had nightmares and asked for outside psychological counseling, which is usually given to officers suffering post-incident stress.

After several weeks, she said, the prison’s health and safety coordinator seemed willing to facilitate her request for trauma counseling and claim for workers’ compensation. But first she had to meet with the warden about her memo detailing a hostile work environment.

“Warden Lewis never brought up the shooting directly, but she said I had hurt people’s feelings. She tried to minimize the situation. She said, ‘Pat, everybody here likes you.’ I said, ‘This is not a matter of being liked. This is a matter of the way people are treated because they come forward and do a job.’ ”

After the meeting, she said, the health and safety coordinator did a 180-degree turn. Suddenly, her request for outside counseling was going to be a problem, Newton said. That’s when she decided to hire a worker’s compensation attorney and take a stress leave.

“It has taken every inch of strength inside me to tell you my story,” Newton told a reporter last week. “I only hope that the staff I care so much about, when they read this, won’t think that I’ve betrayed them for talking. Please don’t portray me as a ‘rat.’ ”