A Death in Lockup

On a Saturday in the summer of 2002, Ramon Gavira was pulled over for drunk driving and taken to Los Angeles County Jail.

Five days after his arrest, the 43-year-old father of five was dead.

Guards say they found Gavira dangling from the bars of a one-man cell with a torn bedsheet tightly knotted around his neck. Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives and the coroner concluded that he had killed himself.

But when Gavira's brothers saw his bruised and battered body at the funeral home a few days later, they began to suspect there was more to the story.

Gavira's body had six broken ribs, a broken collarbone and bruises that would be hard for any man to inflict upon himself. Most curious was a snapped neck bone that medical experts say is more often seen when someone has been strangled by a pair of hands.

Since then, Gavira's family has been pressing a wrongful-death lawsuit that is set for trial early next year. A spokesman for Sheriff Lee Baca was adamant that Gavira committed suicide, and cast his death as an unavoidable tragedy in an understaffed and overcrowded jail system -- the nation's largest.

Regardless of how he died, testimony and other evidence suggest that Gavira -- mentally frail and withdrawing from alcohol from the moment he entered custody -- was deprived of medical care, mocked and beaten during his brief stint behind bars.

In addition, records and interviews show that sheriff's officials did little to determine how Gavira sustained such severe injuries, brushing aside allegations that a female deputy -- who trains as a boxer -- might have been responsible.

Attorney Michael Gennaco, who serves as an independent watchdog over the Sheriff's Department, said he could not comment on specifics because of the litigation. But he said he was convinced that Gavira was not slain.

Still, he acknowledged, "there are a lot of unanswered questions."

Searching for a Muffler

Gavira, an auto mechanic, spent the late morning and early afternoon of July 6, 2002, scouring a junkyard in Wilmington for a part he needed to fix up an old Chevy Blazer for one of his sons. It was typical; he was a protective father who often went out of his way for his children, taking them for barbecues at Magic Johnson Park in South L.A. and to the beach at Marina del Rey.

But as he also often did on weekends, he was drinking heavily.