2 Deputies, Ex-Officer Charged in Beating

Two Orange County sheriff’s deputies and a former Maywood police officer were charged in Los Angeles Friday with beating a Maywood jail inmate into unconsciousness while the three men were off-duty and drunk from attending a bachelor party.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed six felony counts against Deputies Ivan Budiselich, 26, and John Rice, 25, and Officer Michael A. Elliott, 31, who was forced to resign from the Maywood force over the March incident.

Each is accused of beating and threatening to hang Marino D. Martillo of Huntington Park. The incident, prosecutors said, occurred shortly after the officers left a colleague’s bachelor party and went to the Maywood station in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

“All were under the influence of alcohol and they entered the police station so they could use the Breathalyzer in order to determine which one of them was the most intoxicated,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey D. Oscodar, who is handling the case.

Budiselich, Elliott and Rice each were charged with one count of assault under color of authority and one count of assault and battery with serious bodily injury. Assault under color of authority, which can only be filed against law enforcement officers, carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. The assault and battery charge has a maximum punishment of four years in prison.

The officers are scheduled to surrender Monday at their arraignment in Los Angeles Municipal Court.

The attorney representing Rice and Budiselich declined comment Friday, saying he has not yet reviewed the case. But Martin Geragos, Elliott’s lawyer, said the allegations are unfounded and that his client would be vindicated.

Prosecutors allege that the officers showed up at the Maywood station about 2 a.m. on March 23 to visit friends and play with the department’s Breathalyzer. At the station, Oscodar said, Officer John Hoglund told the defendants that he had arrested a man in a red T-shirt who had argued with him and forced him into a chase in which his police car was damaged.

According to prosecutors, the defendants then posed as district attorney’s investigators and entered the jail to look for the man in the red T-shirt. When they asked him to come forward, Martillo, who was in jail on traffic warrants, answered.

The officers then allegedly choked, kicked and hit Martillo until he was unconscious. One officer, Martillo recalled, pinned him to his bunk and said that if he did not stop harassing and complaining about officers they would “hang me and make it look like a suicide.”

It was later determined that Martillo, although dressed in a red T-shirt, was not the man whom Hoglund had arrested.