Five years after her son was beaten so badly by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies that he needed more than 30 stitches and staples to his face and head, Vanessa Perez is still looking for answers. So are county officials tasked with holding the department accountable for misconduct.
Despite a subpoena and an ongoing legal battle, obtaining a complete account of what happened to Vanessa’s son Joseph Perez has proved impossible — at least so far.
The sheriff’s department has released a heavily redacted report outlining its version of what transpired in the San Gabriel Valley community of East Valinda on July 27, 2020.
According to the report, deputies from the Industry Station stopped Joseph, 27, on suspicion of breaking into a car. He punched and kicked them multiple times, the document states. Three deputies injured their hands and a fourth broke his leg falling off a curb. Six deputies punched Joseph and deployed various holds and takedowns before he was arrested and charged with five counts of resisting an executive officer, court records show.
But entire pages of the department’s “use of force” report are blacked out, leaving Vanessa and members of the Civilian Oversight Commission wondering what details are being kept secret.
County oversight officials issued three subpoenas in February for cases under scrutiny, including one seeking an unredacted copy of the Perez file. The County Counsel’s Office has resisted, arguing the files should remain confidential, and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has declined to hand them over.
Amid the subpoena standoff, Vanessa, 43, shows up to speak at nearly every monthly meeting of the oversight commission in a black T-shirt with a picture of her son’s bloodied face.
“Surviving an arrest shouldn’t look like Joseph. And it shouldn’t look like 121 punches either. That’s what they admitted to,“ she told The Times, referring to an unofficial tally she made based on the deputies’ statements in the redacted document.
The beating was so severe, she said, it left her son struggling to carry on a conversation.
“He’s not able to do that anymore,” she said. “It’s just hard for him to socialize, period, with the constant fear.”
A month after the oversight commission‘s subpoena, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna responded by filing a lawsuit, asking a court to determine whether his department must comply. Luna said at the time that the County Counsel’s Office had advised the department that releasing the documents “violates the law.”
In a statement to The Times, the sheriff’s department said it is “taking deliberate steps to resolve the dispute and ensure its actions align with both the law and the principles of transparency.”
Last month, the County Counsel’s Office said in a statement that it “has fully supported” the commission “in its efforts to seek the information it needs to play a powerful oversight role on behalf of LA County citizens. This includes assisting with a declaratory relief action that will hopefully bring judicial clarity to the commission’s ability to obtain the information it seeks.”
Joseph maintains he was not the aggressor in the July 2020 incident. His mother said he was in the middle of a “mental health episode.”
Court records show Joseph has been jailed multiple times since on a range of charges, including methamphetamine possession and damaging a vehicle. In August 2022, he pleaded no contest to one of the five charges from the beating incident and was sentenced to 32 months in state prison.
He is currently incarcerated at Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic after violating his probation from a separate case in which he was convicted of resisting two West Covina police officers.
He has struggled with addiction and been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression and psychosis, according to his mother.
Anne Golden, Joseph’s public defender, said in a recent court hearing that he suffers from impaired executive functioning due to a traumatic brain injury inflicted by the deputies.
In a brief phone call last month from jail, Joseph told The Times he believes the full report about what happened to him should be released to “show that I was in the right.”
“They’re lying about a lot of stuff with my case,” he said. “They lied about how it went down; they’re saying I’m the aggressor when I wasn’t. The reality is they beat me up — they left me for dead.”
The sheriff’s department said the deputies involved in the incident declined to comment.
The department said in a statement that every use of force “incident is thoroughly reviewed to evaluate if policies and procedures were followed,” adding that in “this incident, the use of force … was determined to be within policy.”
Oversight officials seeking records related to Joseph’s case and others have been stymied at every turn, according to Loyola Law School professor Sean Kennedy. Kennedy resigned from the commission in February following a dispute with county lawyers over another matter.
“To have effective and meaningful civilian oversight, it’s necessary for the commission to be able to review confidential documents about police misconduct and use of force,” Kennedy said. “Without that, this is all just oversight theater.”
Last month, Robert Bonner, the oversight commission’s chair, revealed that L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger intended to replace him despite his desire to stay on and finish ongoing work.
Barger said in an email last month that the move “reflects my desire to continue cultivating public trust in the oversight process by introducing new perspectives that support the Commission’s vital work.”
During the commission’s June 26 meeting, Bonner, 84, alleged that powerful people in county government do not want meaningful oversight over the sheriff’s department. A former federal judge who once served as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles and led the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bonner was fiery in his remarks.
He said he believed the County Counsel’s Office was advising the sheriff to withhold documents as a means of “telling this commission what it can and can’t do, and that goes over the line.”
“They treat our subpoenas like public record requests,” Bonner said.
The Civilian Oversight Commission has said it is willing to go into closed session to review the full reports, but the county’s lawyers argue that’s not legal.
On Tuesday, the state Senate’s public safety committee approved a bill previously approved by the state Assembly that would allow oversight commissions across California to conduct closed sessions to review personnel records and other confidential materials.
But the proposal, AB 847, still requires approval from the full state Senate and governor. And even if it does become law, the county counsel’s office argues that the L.A. County code explicitly bars the commission from reviewing sensitive documents in closed session.
Bonner has pushed for the county code to be changed, saying he and other members of the oversight body “vigorously disagree with County Counsel’s interpretation” of it.
“This commission needs subpoena power to be effective, and it needs to have effective subpoena power, which means it needs to be able to go into closed session,” Bonner said during the commission’s June meeting.
The sheriff’s department said it “will abide by the ultimate judicial determination as to whether those records can be lawfully disclosed.”
Whether the oversight body can issue subpoenas is not in dispute. In March 2020 — four months before Joseph was beaten — L.A. County voters overwhelmingly approved Measure R, a ballot initiative that granted the commission subpoena power.
But the county is thwarting the legal orders, according to Bert Deixler, former special counsel to the Civilian Oversight Commission. That intransigence, he said, contributes to a culture of impunity in the sheriff’s department.
“More momentum will be built in the wrong direction, the county will continue to get sued, the county continues to have more and more financial challenges, and it’s a race to the bottom,” he said.
On June 3, Vanessa Perez drove in from her home in West Covina to attend a hearing for her son at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown L.A.
After waiting several hours for him to emerge, she became emotional as Joseph finally walked into the courtroom through a side door. His hands were cuffed in front of his wrinkled yellow jail T-shirt and his ear lobes were stretched with white paper plugs over his tattooed neck.
But despite his lawyer’s pleas for the court to allow Joseph to enter a job training program and immediately begin receiving treatment for his mental health problems, Judge James Bianco ordered him to remain behind bars pending a mental health diversion reinstatement hearing.
“Mr. Perez has been given all the chances that I’m inclined to give him,” Bianco said.
Joseph looked back at his mother once before being escorted back out of the courtroom.
While her son remains locked up for now, Vanessa is demanding the unredacted version of the beating report be made public. She wants to understand why his beating didn’t warrant an internal affairs investigation or discipline for the deputies involved.
“We know Joseph wasn’t the first and won’t be the last,” she said. “With Joseph’s story exposed we … will know how they lied, how they covered their asses, from the deputies to the sergeant to the captain.”
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