Murder Trial Offers Insight Into Rising Violence at Youth Facility

On a broiling summer day four years ago, someone trapped a youth counselor in a mop closet at the young men’s prison in Chino, then stabbed and strangled her.

The killing of Ineasie M. Baker was at once unprecedented--the first of a peace officer in the history of the 55-year-old California Youth Authority--and yet somehow in keeping with the climate of the increasingly violent institution.

The inmate accused of killing Baker went on trial for murder here last week. The case offers the first detailed public accounting of an episode that rocked and then remade the state’s youth prisons.

Baker’s slaying was a watershed between a period of laissez-faire management and relative nurturing at the youth authority and the more repressive era that followed. Some juvenile justice experts say living conditions for wards throughout California have become much more harsh.

Over the next six months, jurors in the trial of inmate James Ferris will get a glimpse of life at the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, what was supposed to be the state’s most secure juvenile lockup.

Security was so loose on Aug. 9, 1996, that Ferris wandered his unit nearly at will, his cell sometimes left unlocked, even though he was a convicted killer. It was so loose that Baker’s colleagues did not know she was missing, much less being brutally attacked just feet from where they worked. It was so loose that the assailant went undetected, even as Baker’s body was carted past a guard station and three checkpoints to a dumpster near the prison’s central yard.

The defense told jurors that Ferris might have been involved after the crime, but there is no evidence that he is the killer.

“How does a lone person get a 143-pound woman out of this storage room, past the control center and down through the day room, past the parole agents’ offices, out and down the ramp to the dumpsters, without somehow being detected?” Deputy Public Defender David Negus asked the jury last week.

It is a question that has haunted many workers at the 1,300-inmate institution. “It’s incredible that it happened,” said Henry Vanderweide, who was removed as superintendent several months after Baker’s death. “It’s very disturbing.”

Vanderweide came to court last week as testimony began in the death penalty trial. Two of the institution’s chaplains and several former employees also sat in the courtroom. Baker’s husband, Donald, and daughter, Tiffany, who both work as guards in adult prisons, looked on from the front row. Other youth authority staffers, relieved of duty as a result of the killing, are scheduled to testify.

Around the state, corrections officers chart the progress of the case in their newsletter. “They follow it closely,” said Donald Baker, 49. “It’s like one of their sisters who they lost.”

The repercussions seem certain to continue even after the trial. Still pending is Donald Baker’s federal lawsuit. He has accused several of his wife’s co-workers of “deliberate indifference” to warnings of danger before and during the attack.

A state inspector general has been probing the youth authority for a year. Investigators found that employees at the Chino prison engaged in a pattern of excessive force. Some of the 1,300 prisoners--ages 17 to 25--were handcuffed and slammed into walls, shot point-blank with riot guns, forced into fights with rival gang members and locked down for days on end, the investigators found. They came to believe that the punitive measures, at least in part, were a backlash after Baker’s death.

“This case really rocked the youth authority,” Negus told the San Bernardino Superior Court jury. “This is a case they are still squabbling about and battling about in their internecine struggles.”

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Ramos sought to keep the focus on Ferris, the now 28-year-old defendant. Ferris was sent to prison in 1989 for killing a 55-year-old Orange County nurse who had befriended him.

“Whether the institution was lax or an individual was lax in their duties may come out during the trial,” Ramos said in an interview. “But that is not a defense to murder. . . . Absolutely all the evidence will indicate this was done alone.”

The prosecutor told the jury that Ferris launched his attack on Baker, 42, because he feared his imminent transfer to the adult prison system. Desperate to escape, Ferris killed the veteran counselor to get her keys, which would have given him easy access to an outer fence that had already been cut, Ramos said.

One former ward is expected testify that Ferris followed Baker into the storage closet. The defendant’s bloody palm print was found on a cardboard box in the closet. The last of several searches of Ferris’ cell finally turned up the missing keys, taped together and buried in white powder inside a can of Ajax, Ramos said. Other witnesses will be able to place the defendant near the dumpsters where the body was left, Ramos said.

In his own painstaking three-day statement to the jury, defense attorney Negus said he will not be able to show exactly how Baker died, because the case is “like a puzzle with no solution. . . . There is no certain answer.”

He conceded that Ferris’ bloody print was found at the scene. But Negus added that the print “could just as easily point to [Ferris as] an accessory after the fact in the case. In that case, then you are going to have to vote ‘not guilty’ on the only crime with which Mr. Ferris is charged, and that is murder.”

Negus called the C & D cell block where Baker died so disorganized that “for the most part, the staff does not know who is there and who isn’t,” giving many prisoners access to the closet where Baker was attacked.

But investigators from the institution quickly focused on Ferris, failing to investigate suspicious actions by other prisoners, the defense attorney said.

Even when a muscle-bound ward, who had been close to Baker, told a staff member not to go into the storage closet the morning after the killing, investigators’ suspicions were not piqued, Negus said. The prisoner ostensibly wanted the staffer to look elsewhere for bats for the day’s softball game. But his action further delayed the discovery of the murder scene, Negus explained.

The four years that have passed since Baker’s death have done little to quell the mystery. Ferris’ defense team examined several theories that have swirled through the institution, including suggestions that Baker was targeted as an African American employee who ran afoul of the prison’s dominant Latino gangs, as a harsh taskmaster who was cracking down on smuggling of contraband or by prisoners who wanted to send a message to Donald Baker, related to his work in the adult prisons.

Some current and former employees at the facility have a gnawing suspicion, although they cannot prove it, that at least one of their colleagues must have been involved in the killing.

Investigators from the Chino Police Department and district attorney’s office reject that as rank conjecture. But it is a theory that continues to circulate in the close-knit culture of correctional officers.

Baker’s family and supporters have grown tired of the speculation, which they said must not overshadow her service and ultimate sacrifice.

A black stone monument stands in memory of the slain counselor opposite the main entrance to the Chino prison. Smaller tributes have been installed at many of the youth authority’s 10 other institutions.

In the lobby of the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse, Baker is one of 38 peace officers listed beneath a statue of a fallen officer. But even that monument, like much in the case, has now been shrouded.

Negus argued in March that the peace officers’ memorial could improperly influence jurors. Judge Ingrid Uhler agreed and the evocative memorial has been covered with two plywood boxes.

On Thursday morning, Negus told the jury that Baker was actually off duty at the time she died. The veteran counselor, ignoring safety guidelines, had removed her duty belt and personal safety alarm and was hanging around the unit after the end of her shift when she was attacked, Negus hassaid.

The argument could be a critical one for Ferris, since the killing of a peace officer can be punishable by death.

Baker’s family and some former colleagues fume at the suggestion that she was not fulfilling her duties when she died.

Donald Baker called it “insulting.” Leonard Wilson Banks, a youth authority chaplain, said he wrote to the court protesting the covering of the peace officers’ memorial.

“There was a lot of unhappiness about that at the institution,” Banks said. “People were really upset about that.”