Cardiff Group Seeks Probe of Slaying : Law Enforcement: Town Council members express concern about deadly force after death of a colleague. Citizens group says it would have looked into shooting anyway.

Drawing on their grass-roots political know-how, members of the Cardiff Town Council have called for an independent investigation into the death of colleague Paul Reynolds, killed this week during a standoff with a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy.

Wayne Holden, president of the council, sent letters Friday asking a citizens group to probe the circumstances of the shooting that occurred early Tuesday morning at a suburban gas station. The group also called for the San Diego County Grand Jury to review the Sheriff’s Department’s policy on deadly force.

“There have been too many killings, too many instances like the one that ended Paul’s life,” Holden said. “What we’d like to see is a change in the local law enforcement policy where we no longer have the reputation of shooting first and asking questions later.”

A spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department said Friday that authorities welcome an outside look at not only the shooting incident, but also at the department-wide use of deadly force.

“We’d be more than happy to cooperate with them in evaluating this policy,” said Dan Greenblat, special assistant to Sheriff Jim Roache. “And once it’s completed, they’ll discover that this department has a number of highly professional and well-trained deputies who go about the business of protecting people’s lives.”

On Thursday night, Cardiff Town Council members held an emergency meeting to discuss a response to the shooting death of Reynolds, the group’s vice president and a manic-depressive who, according to his wife, had been fueled in recent days with the spells of nervous energy that accompany his illness.

Responding to reports of a man wielding a knife at a 24-hour gas station just east of Interstate 5 in Cardiff, Deputy Jeffrey Jackson arrived to find Reynolds lurching around the pumps and talking to himself, authorities say.

Jackson ordered the man to drop the weapon and lie face-up on the pavement. At first, Reynolds complied with the order. But as the officer approached to place him in handcuffs, the man suddenly grabbed the rigging knife that lay nearby on the ground and swung upward.

Jackson fired one shot, which struck Reynolds in the neck. The officer has been placed on administrative leave during the Sheriff’s Department’s investigation of the incident, officials say.

In the days after the shooting, stunned and angry local activists who had once worked alongside Reynolds drew from their experience dealing with bureaucracy to respond to a use-of-deadly-force issue that suddenly hit too close to home.

Rather than merely throwing up their hands, they got on the telephone to newspapers and lawyers and big-city politicians with whom they had worked in the past. They called Roache and County Supervisor Susan Golding.

“Susan was really appalled about the whole thing,” Town Council member Bob Bonde said. “Paul had been so active in local affairs and she’d met him. She knew that this was a community leader killed here, not just some man in the street.”

Council members said sheriff’s officials refused to speak to them at length about the incident, pending the results of the investigation.

Greenblat said Friday that during a telephone call Thursday, the council expressed faith in the Sheriff’s Department--which is contracted to provide routine protection to communities such as Del Mar, Encinitas and Solana Beach that cannot afford their own police forces. Cardiff is part of the city of Encinitas.

“They called us to say that they had confidence in Jim Roache and that they know that he’ll get an accurate and fair investigation,” he said. “They said they felt that because of the recent incident that included the use of deadly force, that another group should look into the situation.”

Bonde said the group was just trying to lend its political voice to the family of a co-worker and friend.

“This is not a witch hunt,” he said. “But we have lost a brilliant political voice, someone who was ready to step in and take the baton of leading local politics. And now he’s gone. It’s a law enforcement pattern that’s got to stop.”

Eileen Luna, executive officer of the county’s citizen law enforcement review board, established in a voter referendum last year, said her group had not yet received the Town Council’s letter.

Luna said the group, which is charged with investigating public acts by deputies or probation officers, would have independently probed the Reynolds shooting.

“We have to investigate all deaths of people in the custody of the Sheriff’s Department or at the hands of deputies,” she said.

But Luna said it is not within the domain of her group to comply with the council’s request for independent laboratory tests to reveal any drugs or chemical substances in Reynolds’ body at the time of his death.

“We’ll take a look at evidence collected by the Sheriff’s Department and independently interview witnesses, but these kinds of blood tests are the things the family could request,” she said.

Greenblat said Deputy Jackson has received several letters of support for his handling of the confrontation, including one from Solana Beach, which he said reads, in part: “I sleep better knowing that you and your co-workers are just a telephone call away.

“You’ve responded to a call for help and you handled your assignment. Thank you! Please know that there are many who support you and the work you do every day. Keep up the good work.”

Greenblat said a citizen’s chances of getting into a life-and-death confrontation with a sheriff’s deputy are minuscule.

“Last year, we had about 1 million individual law enforcement contacts with citizens in the area,” he said. “Three people died from those contacts. That’s 0.000003, or one ten-thousandth of 1%. We need to keep things in perspective.”

Meanwhile, Paul Reynolds’ fellow activists in Cardiff on Thursday hung a black ribbon and a picture on a wooden sign at the entrance to the community, in memory of their friend.

As Bonde said: “There’s no way to express how much we’ll miss him.”