Panel to Probe Slayings at Jail

Citing “horror stories” of jail attacks on his witnesses, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Tuesday that he would create a task force to investigate recent deaths at County Jail and propose reforms.

Cooley said Sheriff Lee Baca and his staff should be engaging in “some serious introspection” over jail security, particularly since the killing in custody of witness Raul Tinajero, allegedly by the murder suspect he had testified against.

Witness attacks undermine justice, Cooley said in an interview. “If the system fails to provide appropriate protection and witnesses get hurt, it can only result in fewer witnesses coming forward,” he said.

Cooley’s call for better protection for inmate witnesses comes as several investigations are underway into the April 20 killing of Tinajero, allegedly by murder suspect Santiago Pineda. Tinajero’s death is the latest of five killings since Oct. 21 in downtown jails.

Angry county supervisors asked Cooley last week to initiate a grand jury inquiry into Tinajero’s killing.

Baca has acknowledged that his staff violated its own rules at least four times in the Men’s Central Jail, allowing Pineda to leave his cell and wander for hours looking for Tinajero.

Using a court pass belonging to another inmate, Pineda left his third-floor cellblock, took an escalator to the first floor and joined a line of inmates preparing to go to court. Deputies discovered Pineda and ordered him back to his cell. Instead he roamed for five hours before penetrating security at Tinajero’s cell module and allegedly strangling him.

Patrick Gomez, president of the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Assn., which represents 6,700 workers including sheriff’s management and professional staff, said the jail had become increasingly unsafe for inmates and those who work there.

“The Sheriff’s Department has an obligation to protect everybody, but the situation has become very dangerous,” Gomez said. “You have had a 15% increase in the number of assaults on personnel between 2002 and 2003. There are more inmate deaths. The jails are operating at minimum staffing levels, and there are fewer supervisors.”

Cooley said the spate of jailhouse slayings might reflect tight government budgets.

“If you had more people [working in the jails], court orders would be followed to protect witnesses, and prisoners wouldn’t be walking around for five hours,” he said.

Several prosecutors who handle hard-core gang cases said they were seeing frequent attacks on witnesses such as in Tinajero’s case.

In March, a gang member who was delivering a tray of food to a witness in a murder case attacked him with a razor. Shane Wilson, who had testified a day earlier, survived the face slashing, which required 200 stitches. In Wilson’s case, the prosecutor had personally warned jailers of the danger.

One prosecutor, who asked not to be named, said he had handled several cases in which witnesses and defendants were placed on the same jail bus and in the same cell.

In Tinajero’s case, a Long Beach judge had ordered March 10 that he be housed in protective custody, but sheriff’s officials said he was in the general population of inmates because the department had never received such an order.

The slain man’s mother, Silvia Tinajero, told The Times her son had assured her that jailers had switched his wristband from white, the color worn by the general inmate population, to blue, which signifies an inmate who poses a risk or is in protective custody.

But the coroner’s investigator found that an inmate identification bracelet was missing from Tinajero’s body when it was examined. The body of the 20-year-old Wilmington man was discovered at 6:20 p.m. April 20 on a mattress under one of the bunks in his cell with a thin white ligature around the neck and a shoe print-like bruise on the neck.

Despite a rule requiring deputies to check cells hourly, jailers didn’t find the body until four hours after Tinajero’s death, when a cellmate phoned his lawyer, who alerted deputies. County Supervisor Gloria Molina publicly asked last week why Baca had failed to live up to a pledge he made in January, after four jail killings, to have cells checked regularly.

One victim was Ki Chul Hong, 34, who had just arrived Oct. 21 at Men’s Central Jail to serve a five-day sentence for prostitution when he was chased by rival gang members and stabbed 36 times. His body was not found until 16 hours later in a laundry basket.

In early December, two inmates who were drunk on bootleg liquor allegedly beat 33-year-old Stephen Prendergast to death overnight without guards noticing either screams or the smell of alcohol. Mario Alvarado, 24, was killed Dec. 9 at the Inmate Reception Center next door to the Twin Towers jail downtown.

The fourth inmate killed, Kristopher Faye, 21, of Los Angeles, was stabbed 26 times during a Jan. 12 fight involving as many as 200 inmates at Men’s Central Jail.

Gomez said part of the problem came from a lack of technology to track the 9,000 inmates, including the more than 600 murder suspects who populate Men’s Central Jail on any given day.

A sheriff’s deputy, who has spent a decade working there but asked not to be named because of potential reprisals, said inmates often escaped notice during the day.

The only times inmates’ ID bracelets are regularly checked are when they line up for a trip to court or at 8 p.m., when they are locked down in their cells for the night and checked one by one. The deputy said discussions about placing scanners in other parts of the jails, including hallways and cellblocks, have so far yielded no results.

The sheriff has added overtime and staffing at times, but Gomez said it was usually for only a short period.

Permanent fixes need to be made, he said. “It comes down to they pay now or they pay later,” Gomez said. “I’d like to see our facilities staffed above the minimum staffing levels.”