It was just at 12:30 pm on June 9 when the Sheriff deputies of the County of Los Angeles responded to a burglary in progress in a house in Lynwood.
Upon arrival, according to the department Summary of incidentsThey saw Federico Rodriguez, 45, through a window, holding what seemed to be a pair of scissors.
Hearing cries inside, the deputies forced an open door and entered the house, where they found Rodriguez stabbing a woman several times. Sgt. Marcos Esquivel immediately drawn his handgun, the images of his worn out of the body showed and fired several shots that killed Rodriguez.
The incident was the fifth of the six fatal shots by deputies that the Sheriff department reported So far this year.
The Rodriguez woman survived. But despite the apparently vital actions of the deputies, two days later, the case became a controversy point in a broader dispute between the ministry and the office of inspector general of the county, which investigates misconduct and the use of deadly force by the police.
The Inspector General’s office sent a letter On June 11, the Comté supervisor council raised concerns that those responsible were blocked by shots by deputies and deaths in the county prisons.
Inspector General Max Huntsman declared that his office interprets the law of the State which led to its creation more than a decade ago as giving him and his staff the power to conduct significant surveys on the spot, state legislation approved in 2020 strengthening this power.
Inspector General Max Huntsman listens to the testimonies in the hearing room of Robinson at the Loyola Law School in 2024.
(IRFAN KHAN / LOS Angeles Times)
Huntsman said that allowing his staff to visit fire scenes and receive information directly from homicide detectives and the Sheriff department staff, while corpses have not yet been removed is essential for appropriate surveillance.
But the Sheriff department has repeatedly denied access or limited access, said Huntsman. The letter of June 11 announced the “indefinite suspension of the office of the Inspector General regularly deployments to the shots involved and to deaths in detention.”
Huntsman said that the decision to stop deployments was a response to a persistent lack of transparency from the Sheriff department.
“The goal of going is to conduct an independent investigation. If all we do is to eat what they want us to know is not an independent investigation,” he told Times. “We are not going to pretend to do it when we can only take a look under the curtain.”
During the meeting of the civil supervisory committee on July 17, the Sheriff Robert Luna said that his department “would now have a process in place” to allow managers to respond to shooting scenes to contact an assistant sheriff to ensure “a little more surveillance” during the process.
An interior view of the Altadena sheriff station in January.
(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)
Luna described Huntsman’s letter of June 11 as “alarmer”, but challenged how many times the civil servants had been refused, saying that he was only aware “once – at least in the past five years”.
Commissioner Jamon Hicks realized further, asking if the ministry could be incorrect on the number of times that access has been limited or refused, since the office of the inspector general alleges that he was a recurring question.
“It could be, and I would like to see the information,” said Luna. “I have not been provided to me to this day.”
Huntsman told Times that his office officials were “forbidden to enter” the home of Rodriguez on July 9, as well as members of the District Prosecutor’s Office and the Sheriff Department’s internal affairs office. It was at least the seventh time that the Sheriff department had had poorly limited access since 2020, he said.
In a press release, the Sheriff department said that “the assertion that the OIG was denied access on June 9 in a [deputy-involved shooting] The scene in Lynwood is inaccurate. »»
“A representative of the OIG was on the scene and received the same briefing, as well as the head of the division concerned, the internal affairs office, the civil dispute office, the training office and the Los Angeles County Prosecutor’s Office,” the press release said.
An external view of the job banner outside the Altadena sheriff station in January.
(All J. Schaben / Los Angeles)
The declaration continued by saying that the Department is “aware of only one incident on February 27, 2025”, in which the OIG was denied access to an implicated shooting scene.
“The Sheriff department remains firmly attached to the transparency of the police and continues to work closely with all surveillance organizations,” the statement said.
During the July 17 meeting, Dara Williams, deputy chief of the Inspector General’s office, said that office staff often arrived at shooting scenes a few hours after the deputies pulled the trigger due to the logistical challenges to travel through the county. Homicide detectives from the Sheriff department generally have preliminary results and offer scenes.
But on several occasions, duty has been denied access entirely, letting them rely solely on the information that the Sheriff department chooses to release, said Williams.
Hans Johnson, the newly elected president of the civil supervisory committee, said that investigators could not do their job properly without being able to examine the homicide scenes.
“We are counting on you, in part, like the eyes and ears of the community and in these cases of great value and very disturbing of death and death,” he said at the July 17 meeting.
Williams said the Sheriff department had also been “painfully slow” which responded to additional information and files following homicides by deputies. She said that in a particularly blatant example: “We served an assignment in October of last year and that we are still waiting for documents and answers.”
Responding to Huntsman’s letter on June 16, Luna wrote to the Supervisors’ Council that the Department’s Constitutional Police Bureau “helped the OIG providing information on the department at 49 of 53 cases” since January. “It is enough to say,” he added later in the letter, “robust communications take place between the OIG and the ministry. Any contrary affirmation is false.”
Luna said that sometimes access could be limited to preserve the evidence, but Williams said that she “did not think it is right to say that we were excluded” for this reason.
Williams told the Commission that she was not allowed to visit a scene earlier this year that Huntsman later said that Times was an incident on February 27 in Rosemead.
The Sheriff department Summary of incidents said MP Gregory Chico had shot Susan Lu, 56, after refusing orders to drop a meat cleaner and raised the blade “to deputies”. Lu was taken to the hospital and declared dead later in the day.
In her letter of June 16, Luna wrote that “the OIG, the Internal Affairs Office (IAB), other units in the department and the managers have been denied access … Due to concerns concerning the preservation of evidence, taking into account the confined area and the complexity of the scene provision.”
Williams told the Commission “There was a narrow corridor, but the real incident took place in a room, so I don’t know why we could not have descended this narrow corridor to see in the room” where the homicide took place.
“The main thing,” she added later, “do we not want to mislead the public to give them the idea that it is actually effective surveillance because, once again, we simply get information from the department.”