June 17--A former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy testified Wednesday that he and other deputies beat a handcuffed visitor to Men's Central Jail and tried to justify the violence by falsely accusing the visitor of attacking them.
Pantamitr Zunggeemoge told jurors in the brutality trial of three of his former colleagues in a downtown federal courtroom that the deputies concocted a story that the visitor assaulted them when they unfastened one of his handcuffs to fingerprint him.
The visitor, Gabriel Carrillo, had been handcuffed throughout and was repeatedly punched and pepper-sprayed, Zunggeemoge said. He and his colleagues wrote false reports and he lied during a preliminary hearing for Carrillo after the visitor was charged with assaulting law enforcement officers, Zunggeemoge said under questioning by a federal prosecutor.
"I didn't want to be the one who told the truth about what really happened," Zunggeemoge said when asked why he had lied. "Everyone was going to go with the story we made up."
He said he also lied during the Sheriff's Department's internal investigation into the incident, saying he knew he could lose his job and face prosecution if he told the truth.
Zunggeemoge's' testimony came in the trial of three deputies accused of using unreasonable force on Carrillo and falsifying records to obstruct justice.
On trial are Deputies Sussie Ayala and Fernando Luviano and former Sgt. Eric Gonzalez, a supervisor at the jail visitor center. Ayala and Gonzalez also face charges of conspiring to violate Carrillo's civil rights.
Zunggeemoge, who said he now works as a tutor, testified that he has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and deprivation of rights in connection with the February 2011 arrest of Carrillo.
During his testimony, Zunggeemoge recalled confronting Carrillo in the jail's visiting center over carrying a cellphone in violation of the jail's visiting rules. He said he cuffed both of Carrillo's hands behind his back and brought him to a side room that deputies use as a break room. Zunggeemoge shoved the visitor up against a refrigerator and started patting him down, he testified.
Zunggeemoge recalled becoming annoyed as Carrillo questioned him about why he had been detained. The deputy lifted the visitor's handcuffed hands upwards "so he could feel some pain," Zunggeemoge said in court.
After retrieving the cellphone, Zunggeemoge left the room to run Carrillo's name through a criminal database. When he returned, he found Carrillo and Luviano struggling with each other, he said.
Zunggeemoge testified that Carrillo -- his hands still cuffed behind him -- was slammed face-first into the floor as the two deputies took him down. He said Luviano repeatedly struck Carrillo's face while Zunggeemoge attacked the visitor's legs and lower back.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Lizabeth Rhodes asked whether there was "any legitimate law enforcement purpose" for the blows. Zunggeemoge replied there were not.
"And did the force exceed what was necessary at the time?" Rhodes asked.
"Yes, ma'am," the former deputy said.
Luviano used pepper spray on Carrillo's face, prompting the visitor to become teary eyed and start moaning, Zunggeemoge testified. Snot ran down Carrillo's nose and face and he had trouble breathing, Zunggeemoge said.
He said Carrillo never spat at the deputies.
Zunggeemoge said deputies had not begun the process of fingerprinting Carrillo when the violence occurred. Shown photographs of the room from the day of the incident, he noted that the fingerprint equipment was still on a shelf rather than on the table where they would be placed to take someone's fingerprints.
After the incident, he, Gonzalez, Luviano and Ayala gathered to discuss the account they would concoct to justify the force, Zunggeemoge said. Gonzalez, he said, was the driving force behind the strategy and stood next to him as Zunggeemoge wrote his report at a computer terminal.
"He was basically telling me what to write," Zunggeemoge said.
As the former deputy testified, Gonzalez, sitting at the defense table, shook his head.
During her opening statement Tuesday, Rhodes zeroed in on a text message Gonzalez sent to another deputy that included a photo of Carrillo's bloodied and bruised face. In the message, Rhodes said, Gonzalez joked and bragged about the beating. "Looks like we did a better job. ... Where's my beer big homie," the text said.
Defense attorneys contend that Carrillo was the aggressor and that the account of his attacking deputies with an uncuffed hand was accurate. During opening statements, the lawyers said the deputies were rightly concerned that Carrillo's attempt to carry a cellphone into the facility was possibly a part of larger plot to assist inmates and were justified to subdue him as they did. Their reports and statements on the incident afterward were accurate, the attorneys said.
Ayala and Luviano have been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the trial. Gonzalez left the department in 2013.
A federal grand jury initially indicted Zunggeemoge and another deputy, Noel Womack. Both men pleaded guilty to lesser charges as part of deals they struck with prosecutors, which included an agreement to testify.
In the statement he gave prosecutors as part of his plea deal, Womack said Carrillo was handcuffed during the beating. He also said he copied another deputy's report of the incident to make sure his account was in line with the others, court records show. He added that he watched as Gonzalez laid out all the deputies' reports on a table to compare them and "ensure their consistency."
Defense attorneys have indicated that they will attack the credibility of the two men, that they are now lying about what happened in an attempt to avoid lengthy prison sentences.
