Files on Deputy Death Shredded, Suit Alleges

The county’s former finance director alleges in court papers filed Friday that her investigative file on the accidental shooting death of sheriff’s Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins by a fellow officer was shredded by a top county official.

At the time, Eileen T. Walsh was investigating the death in her capacity as supervisor of the county’s risk management department. The file included statements from numerous witnesses about the Christmas 1993 shooting, including her notes and background information on those involved, according to her attorney, Steven J. Kaplan.

The file was among several county documents that Walsh said disappeared from her desk after she was placed on administrative leave in January 1995, six weeks after the county’s declaration of bankruptcy.

Within days, her office was taken over by former Assistant Sheriff Walter Fath, who brought the paper shredder from the Sheriff’s Department.

“There was no log of what documents went into the shredder and the county’s position is that they don’t know what happened to them,” Kaplan said in an interview. “It’s a pretty suspicious thing. There hadn’t been a shredder in the office before and then, when Eileen gets moved out, the shredder gets moved in.”

Fath, now a private security consultant, denied shredding any of Walsh’s documents, as the lawsuit alleges. He said the shredder was brought in for Sheriff Brad Gates, who also began working out of Walsh’s office and needed to destroy daily updates on active law-enforcement cases.

“I never saw a Robins file the entire time I was there,” Fath said. “All I shredded were some notes I had or a few obscene letters we got.”

Former county administrative assistant Lynne Fishel said she knew Fath was shredding papers with the machine but had no idea what was being shredded.

The presence of the shredder has interested attorneys for Merrill Lynch, the financial giant being sued by the county for liability in the loss of $1.6 billion in the county’s investment fund. Former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron admitted guilt in skimming interest earned from risky investments and diverting it to the county’s ailing budget. Assistant Treasurer Matthew Raabe was found guilty last month of participating in the scheme.

Fath said Merrill Lynch attorneys spent much of a day during his deposition asking about the shredder.

The allegations about the Robins file are contained in a trial brief filed Friday by Kaplan on behalf of Walsh, who is suing the county for what she says is a wrongful demotion. Also named in the suit is Health Care Agency Director Tom Uram, who fired Walsh within hours of taking over as acting county administrator.

Walsh contends she was a victim of a “good old boys’ network” that ran county government, including Uram, to whom she’d complained repeatedly over the years about his off-color jokes about women and those of others. She said Uram told her he didn’t want women, especially Walsh, in positions of authority within county government.

Kaplan said Walsh was a maverick who frequently voiced her opinions, which were sometimes at odds with other county managers’.

An example was the Robins shooting, Kaplan said, which Walsh investigated in her position as supervisor of the county’s risk management section, which evaluates all claims of wrongdoing against the county.

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Walsh hadn’t made a formal recommendation on how the county should handle the shooting. But she told current risk management chief Dennis Bunker and others that she believed there was racial hostility by Brian Scanlan, the deputy who shot Robins during an impromptu training exercise in Lake Forest, and that the county could be held liable, Kaplan said.

In his deposition, Bunker said he believed the death should be handled as a workers’ compensation case. At the time, Gates advocated compensating the family for the tragic shooting even before a formal claim had been filed.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade said this week that he recalls only vague references to paper shredding during grand jury testimony involving the bankruptcy. A separate grand jury investigation into the Robins death resulted in no charges being filed against Scanlan.

“There are paper shredders in almost every office and that doesn’t mean anything nefarious was going on,” Wade said. “If there were documents being shredded that should be been preserved, sure, that would cause us some concern.”

Walsh’s lawsuit contends that she was placed on administrative leave and then demoted by Uram, actions that violated her employment agreement. She also said she was targeted by then-Supervisor Roger R. Stanton after refusing his demand to retract statements she’d made about him to a Times reporter investigating whether Stanton was encouraging companies to support his political allies in exchange for getting lucrative county contracts. Stanton has denied the allegations.

Two weeks after Walsh was placed on leave, a group of county officials, including Fath, met for a strategy session in advance of a settlement conference with attorneys for Robins’ survivors. The deputy’s widow, Rosemary, has filed a $15-million claim against the county on behalf of herself and the couple’s young daughter.

A subsequent settlement deal structured by the county would have paid the Robins family nearly $5 million over their lifetimes but it was never approved. In December 1996, county officials rejected a $2.4-million settlement sought by Robins’ family.

Last month, more than three years after the shooting, Rosemary Robins filed a civil suit against the county, alleging that the county was lax in its supervision of deputies and that her husband’s civil rights were violated.

Walsh eventually was transferred to a lower-paying job in the county waste department, working for then-manager Murry S. Cable, whose behavior toward women had prompted many of Walsh’s complaints. She now works at a county dump in Brea; Cable left the county in 1995 and died this week at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.