Inmate recounts his alleged assault by officers charged with Tyree killing

SAN JOSE, Calif. In an exclusive interview, a mentally ill Santa Clara County inmate said he was taunted for not fighting another inmate, then pummeled in the head and mouth during an assault by three correctional officers that authorities say was a prelude to their fatal beating of Michael Tyree.

Juan Alberto Villa’s 45-minute session with The San Jose Mercury News was his first public description of the harrowing Aug. 26 encounter. At one point, he said, one of the guards remarked, “I could have hit you with this,” gesturing to a baton, “but I wanted to use my fist.”

Villa spoke less than 24 hours before the Sheriff’s Office swarmed the same cellblock Friday, locked it down, rotated in new guards and launched a criminal investigation after receiving complaints that correctional officers were threatening inmate witnesses in the Tyree murder case.

Villa did not mention any threats, but he detailed how the guards Jereh Lubrin, Matthew Farris and Rafael Rodriguez assaulted him shortly before they allegedly attacked Tyree, who was also mentally ill.

“All three were hitting me,” Villa said. “It took about 15 or 20 minutes.”

Villa, 44, later told investigators about the attack leading to additional assault charges against the officers and how, while freshly bruised and battered, he heard Tyree’s screams for mercy morph to whimpers and then silence.

Attorneys for the three correctional officers could not immediately be reached on Friday for comment. The three have not yet entered pleas.

Deputy public defender Stefany Glass, who represents Villa, confirmed that the account he gave to a reporter was the same as what Villa told her and authorities. She also lamented how mentally ill inmates are treated in jail custody.

“It’s just absolutely abhorrent that this had to happen to not only one person but two,” Glass said. “We’re talking about mentally ill people who do not have the capacity to express themselves or defend themselves the way someone without that illness could. And that also goes for reporting things to authorities.”

Glass added that “major changes are necessary.” Sheriff Laurie Smith, in announcing the formation of a commission to audit jail practices, said Thursday that one of the first changes would be the evaluation of inmate complaints “from the assumption that the complaint is true.”

That was met with objection by Lance Scimeca, president of the union that represents county correctional officers.

“I might not be a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, but the last time I checked, individuals in this country are innocent until proven guilty,” Scimeca said. “This theory holds true for correctional officers, as well.”

Friday’s lockdown is the first evidence the sheriff is following through on her new directions.

Under state law, it is illegal to intimidate witnesses. Maximum penalties range from one year in county jail if the offense is charged as a misdemeanor and four years if it is charged as a felony.

“The Sheriff’s office takes these allegations seriously and will take the necessary steps to ensure that witnesses are not intimidated,” the Sheriff’s Office said in a written statement that also said that undersheriff John Hirokawa “dispatched Criminal Detectives and Internal Affairs Investigators to the Main Jail to begin an immediate investigation.”

The action came after the mother of an inmate housed on the same floor as Tyree and Villa said she received a telephone call from the jail and spoke to several worried prisoners there. She asked not to be identified for fear of retribution against her son. The woman said one man told her he was warned by another inmate that “Lubrin’s friends,” meaning fellow guards, were trying to arrange for gang members to assault him.

The sixth floor houses people in protective custody, including former gang members and the mentally ill, complicating investigators’ efforts to determine whether the threats Friday were real.

But one inmate in the unit has apparently recanted his account of what happened, sources close to the investigation said.

Villa told his story in a visiting booth on the Main Jail’s sixth floor, not far from where investigators allege the same three officers killed Tyree. The inmate, whose latest jail term began in late May for missing his annual sex-offender registration requirement, said that in the early evening of Aug. 26, he was in a common area when he got into a dispute with another inmate over a debt. To avoid further confrontation, Villa purportedly contacted Lubrin and asked to be “locked down,” or taken back to his cell.

“I was angry and I slammed my cell door,” Villa said, noting that Lubrin appeared to take notice of the gesture.

Villa said he spent the next three hours reading a book in his cell.

The next part of his account matches what sheriff’s investigator Sgt. Marc Carrasco summarized in a statement of facts that accompanied the murder charges against Lubrin, Farris and Rodriguez: that the three officers, during routine inmate searches for hoarded clothing, entered his cell about 11 p.m. and assaulted him.

Villa said the officers taunted him for backing down from a fight in the earlier debt dispute, adding that Lubrin threw the first punches in the assault.

“He hit me in the head, then he hit me in the mouth,” he said.

Villa said Lubrin then showed him a roughly 6-inch hard-plastic baton known commonly as a Kubotan and one of the few weapons guards are allowed to carry.

Villa said the officers then tried to handcuff him, which Carrasco contends “twisted his arms leaving visible marks on them.”

At some point during the encounter, Villa said, Farris put him in a headlock, and that all three officers hit him. They left and carried on their rounds.

Eventually, authorities say, the three officers made their way to Tyree’s cell.”I read in the newspaper and they said (Tyree) wasn’t invisible,” Villa said, referring to statements made by District Attorney Jeff Rosen after the murder charges were filed. “He wasn’t. We heard everything.”

Villa said he and Tyree generally kept to themselves and quietly battled mental illness schizophrenia in the case of Villa, bipolar disorder for Tyree. For them, the afflictions meant adult lives marked by periodic stints in jail and, when they were out, homelessness.

Villa said he gets no gratification from the news of the officers’ arrests and charges.

“I just care about Michael,” he said. “We didn’t know each other well, but he was my friend. He was not a righteous man, but he was a good man. He didn’t bother anybody.”

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