Sheriff Reassigns 3 Workers After Fatal Jail Incident

The Los Angeles County’s Sheriff’s Department has reassigned two deputies and a custody assistant who were allegedly involved in the altercation at Twin Towers Correctional Facility that ended with an inmate’s death, a sheriff’s division chief said Wednesday.

Bob Pash, chief of the department’s custody division, said a third deputy allegedly present during the incident will probably be reassigned when he returns from his vacation, which began just after the Aug. 1 shift in which inmate Danny Smith died.

Pash said the men were not relieved of their badges and are still peace officers, but will have other duties in the jail system that do not involve dealing directly with inmates.

“It’s like a field officer who gets involved in a shooting and is reassigned to a field house for a period of time,” he said.

In a separate incident, seven other deputies and a custody assistant have been relieved of police posts and assigned to civilian duties pending an investigation into an alleged beating of another prisoner at Twin Towers on Tuesday, Pash said.

He said fellow employees reported that incident, and he called the inmate’s injuries “minor.”

“He confirmed, ‘Yes, I was beaten and here are my injuries,’ ” Pash said. “There are more injuries on that inmate than there were on Mr. Smith.”

Pash said the deputies reassigned after Smith’s death will remain in their new posts at least until the Los Angeles County coroner’s office determines the cause of Smith’s death and possibly until the in-house probe of the incident--which the FBI also is investigating--is complete.

Asked why those deputies were not relieved of their badges like the eight officers after the Tuesday incident, Pash said, “It’s different cases.

“We see them differently,” he said. “In the [Tuesday incident] we see enough there to make a relief of duty for those eight people. In the Smith case, we do not.”

The department admitted Tuesday that Smith had been in handcuffs during his altercation with deputies. In a previous news release, the department maintained that Smith attacked the deputies when they took off his handcuffs.

Fellow inmates said deputies threw Smith to the floor, held a flashlight under his throat and beat him as he yelled that he had a bad heart and couldn’t breathe.

Just days before the incident, Smith had been hospitalized for hypertension, Pash said.

“This is an incident that has raised a great deal of concern in the media, in the community, among elected officials,” Sheriff Sherman Block, who faces a runoff election against Lee Baca in November, said at a news conference. “In cases like this, the sooner you can get the facts out the better it’s going to be.”

Smith, arrested July 16 for being a convicted narcotics addict allegedly in possession of a firearm, was awaiting a court hearing and being held on $100,000 bail, officers said.