Baca Assailed Over Jail Killings

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors demanded a wide-ranging probe of jail operations Wednesday, sharply criticizing Sheriff Lee Baca during a rancorous public hearing for failing to protect five inmates killed in downtown jails since October.

The five slayings over about six months marked a significant increase in deadly violence in the county’s 18,000-inmate jail system, which averages about two killings a year.

Supervisors expressed anger over what they called a pattern of violence, mismanagement and a lack of accountability at county jails.

Citing one highly publicized case, the board said the killing of witnesses by criminal suspects had a potentially disastrous impact on the local justice system.

Santiago Pineda, an accused murderer being held at Men’s Central Jail, was charged this week with strangling the chief witness against him, apparently after Pineda was able to leave his cell on April 20 and wander freely for hours until finding the cell where the witness was being held.

Pineda allegedly followed another inmate into the cell where Raul Tinajero was being held and killed him.

“If you would have had your custody personnel looking at cells like they are supposed to,” Supervisor Gloria Molina told Baca, “ ... this prisoner would not have been roaming around for five hours in our jails looking for his victim.”

Baca, who has apologized for the killing, said at least four department policies were violated that allowed Pineda to reach Tinajero’s cell. He asked the board to withhold judgment until the Sheriff’s Department completed its investigation over the next eight weeks.

“Sheriff, I have a kid, and every time there was something wrong, she said, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Am I supposed to say, ‘Oh, that’s right, you didn’t do it?’ ” Molina told Baca.

The board this week asked for a grand jury investigation of the Tinajero killing.

Since the killing was first reported in The Times last month, the board has learned details of four other jailhouse killings:

* Ki Chul Hong, 33, was found dead in the basement of the Men’s Central Jail on Oct. 21, 2003. He had been stabbed 36 times and strangled. His body was stuffed in a laundry basket with a plastic bag over his head. Hong had just arrived to serve a five-day sentence for prostitution.

Three gang members -- Jae Cho, 28, Kyu Hon Lee, 27, and Lee Chung, 26, all of Los Angeles -- have been charged with his murder.

* Stephen Prendergast, 33, was beaten at Men’s Central Jail on Dec. 8 and died the next day. Deputies found him semiconscious on the floor of his cell, bleeding from a cut on the head. Prendergast, who had been held at Patton State Hospital, was returning from a court appearance on drug charges.

Inmates Rafael S. Ferman, 22, and Jonathan Newell, 20, both allegedly drunk on jail-brewed alcohol, were charged with Prendergast’s murder. The two suspects had been in jail on weapons charges.

* Mario Alvarado, 24, was killed Dec. 9 at the Inmate Reception Center next door to the Twin Towers Jail downtown. Alvarado, a transient, had been arrested for spousal abuse. He died from asphyxia and a beating that inflicted multiple head injuries, according to a coroner’s report.

Janitors found his body near a toilet inside a large holding cell where 30 to 50 other inmates had been awaiting transfer. The beating was so severe, a coroner’s investigator noted, that blood was splattered across adjacent walls.

Inmate Timothy Trijillo, 25, identified as a Highland Park gang member, was charged with the killing.

* Kristopher Faye, 21, of Los Angeles was stabbed 26 times during what sheriff’s officials categorized as a fight involving as many as 200 inmates in Men’s Central Jail that left several men injured.

Faye was stabbed with makeshift knives in the arms, chest and neck, hit with fists and kicked by as many as three inmates, according to a coroner’s investigator. Faye was awaiting trial for residential burglary after being arrested in November, according to records. Authorities have not identified any suspects in the case.

The Sheriff’s Department is also investigating a jailhouse attack on a witness who had testified in a San Fernando Valley murder case. Doctors needed 200 stitches to bind the wounds of Tony Shane Wilson, who was slashed on March 27 at Men’s Central Jail by an inmate who used a ruse to leave his cell and attack Wilson with a homemade knife.

“The blade came within a quarter-inch of his jugular,” said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney’s office.

Sheriff’s Capt. Ray Leyva, who oversees 6,400 inmates at Men’s Central Jail, said budget cuts and reduced staffing at the jail made it difficult to control increasingly violent prisoners.

“We are running three state prisons under this roof and we are doing it with a third of the staff you have at a state prison,” Leyva said Wednesday. He said he did the best he could with 85 to 150 deputies who work the downtown jail.

Supervisors are considering cutting the Sheriff’s Department’s $1.6-billion annual budget by about $35 million in the coming fiscal year.

Leyva said the recent jail homicides were “independent events that couldn’t be prevented unless you have a deputy in front of every single cell.”

Supervisors scolded Baca several times in both public and closed-door hearings Wednesday for last month’s killing of Tinajero, a reluctant witness. A judge had ordered the Sheriff’s Department to give special protection to the 20-year-old Wilmington man while he was being held in Men’s Central Jail. Tinajero had testified that he saw Pineda choke a man last year and then run over him with a car.

Baca said jailers violated several policies the day Tinajero was killed. For example, deputies allowed Pineda to leave his cell using a pass that belonged to another inmate. Another deputy failed to stop Pineda from entering Tinajero’s cellblock. And jailers allowed Pineda to leave Tinajero’s cell several hours after the killing, Baca said.

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Times staff writers Sue Fox and Anna Gorman contributed to this report.