Orange County Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson suspended five employees Tuesday and called for an FBI investigation after the release of grand jury transcripts that showed Theo Lacy jail guards relying on inmates to enforce order while they watched TV, slept, played video games and engaged in cellphone text chats.
The paid suspensions include the three jailers on duty in October 2006 when John Derek Chamberlain was tortured, sodomized and beaten to death by fellow inmates during an attack that lasted nearly an hour not far from the glass-enclosed guard station.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, April 13, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 80 words Type of Material: Correction
Orange County Sheriff's Dept.: An article in Wednesday's California section about the suspension of Orange County Sheriff's Department personnel stemming from a grand jury investigation said transcripts from the proceeding showed that deputies and high-ranking officials "tampered with evidence." According to the grand jury transcript, a sheriff's special officer made an addition to a jail log and an undersheriff altered a memo. However, those documents had not been submitted to the grand jury as evidence when the changes were made.
Also suspended were an internal affairs investigator who allegedly pressured a grand jury witness to reveal her testimony to him, and a women's jail guard who admitted to the grand jury investigating Chamberlain's death that she had lied during a previous appearance before it.
In an interview, Anderson said he had launched what would become the largest internal affairs investigation in the history of his department. The investigation will likely involve interviews with dozens if not hundreds of current and former Theo Lacy employees, he said.
"I've given orders to find everybody identified in the grand jury report and move forward," he said. "I can't think of a lower standard they were acting at. This is clearly a case of supervisors not doing their jobs and deputies who felt it was OK to behave this way."
He said the grand jury transcripts painted an unsettling picture of the jail system and illustrated a complete breakdown in command structure: "Where were the sergeants? There was a failure to supervise and failure to manage."
At Theo Lacy, some 25 sergeants, seven lieutenants and one captain monitored about 400 deputies and correctional officers. If sergeants had been properly keeping watch, Anderson said, they certainly would have noticed deputies watching movies and sending cellphone text messages when they should have been prowling the jail checking on inmates.
Anderson also invited the FBI to investigate possible violations of Chamberlain's civil rights. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the agency had agreed to meet with Anderson and other Orange County officials to determine whether an inquiry was warranted.
Chamberlain, charged with possessing child pornography, was killed Oct. 5, 2006, by inmates who mistakenly believed he was charged with child molestation -- information that inmates say was provided to them by a jail deputy.
