VIPs Get an Eyeful in Tour of Jail

A VIP tour meant to show the difficulty of managing thousands of prisoners in the Men’s Central Jail had an unexpected bonus Wednesday, when visiting politicians came across the scene of two foiled escape attempts that had taken place hours earlier.

In one cell, an inmate with a gun had attacked a guard. In a neighboring cell, the inmate had acquired a 16-pound sledgehammer, bolt cutters, a floor jack and a makeshift rope.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who was trying to prove his contention that he needed more staff and funding for the jail, where five inmates have been killed over the last seven months.

“Now people have seen firsthand what the problems are here,” Baca told the civic leaders and reporters he was leading on the tour.

But the escape attempts quickly grabbed the media’s attention. The tour’s last stop was a section of the jail where, at 1 a.m. Wednesday, a deputy discovered inmate Jose Pena with a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol.

After hearing loud noise coming from Pena’s cell in the medical wing, Deputy Hector Beltran opened the cell door and Pena jammed the door open with his foot, Cmdr. Dennis Conte said. As the two struggled, Pena pointed the pistol at the startled deputy, who struck Pena with a flashlight.

With the help of three other deputies, Beltran subdued Pena. The deputies discovered that Pena had broken the barred window with a piece of metal and then used a line or rope to pull up a hammer and gun from the street several floors below.

Authorities said they believed an accomplice was positioned near railroad tracks to help in Pena’s planned escape. The gun, they later learned, was not loaded.

In a cell next door, they found that a second inmate, identified as Grant John, had smashed his window with a 16-pound sledge hammer and bolt cutters. They found a floor jack on the ledge.

Pena, according to deputies, already is serving a 40-years-to-life sentence and had been brought to the jail because of a pending trial in a burglary case.

Baca pointed to Pena as one of the thousands of inmates his department must manage on a shrinking budget for the nation’s largest jail.

The jail houses more than 6,000 inmates, of whom 550 are accused of homicides. As few as 100 deputies work in the jail at one time, Baca said.

“Do more with less,” he said. “That is what we’re compelled to do. It only makes sense that something’s going to break.”

The event that triggered the tour was the killing last month of inmate Raul Tinajero, allegedly by another prisoner who had wandered the halls of the jail until he found and strangled him. Tinajero was the main witness against his suspected killer, Santiago Pineda.

On Wednesday, Baca acknowledged for the first time that his deputies did get a “keep away” directive from the court to protect Tinajero and that he was wearing a blue wrist band to designate that status.

Tinajero’s death was the fifth since Oct. 21. Baca said that in three of the cases, jail-brewed alcohol was involved.

Sheriff’s homicide Capt. Ray Peavy said it is not always easy to separate inmates. “There are homicide suspects sprinkled throughout the jail system, and it’s not unusual to end up in a cell with a murderer,” he said.

Baca showed visitors that the jail is far from being a locked down facility, as thousands of inmates are constantly moving from their cells to courts, attorney appointments and medical treatment.

“It’s almost an impossible job,” he said. “Mistakes will be made.”

The tour was a window into a labyrinth of barred doors and inhuman sounds.

It began with a visit to a cell in the Inmate Reception Center, where 40 inmates were squeezed into 120 square feet the night Mario Alvarado was beaten to death.

Peavy said accused killer Timothy Trijillo labeled Alvarado “a rat,” an informant, and inmates quickly covered the windowed door and “made a lot noise” to cover the sounds of his killing. His body was concealed for hours afterward in a toilet area.

“It’s a symptom of a lack of resources,” Baca said of the reason so many inmates had been in the reception center.

Peavy said seven inmates who witnessed the killing cooperated with authorities, something that he said is generally rare.

The tour group was also reminded that the jail is unsanitary. “Touch only what you have to,” said one deputy. Infections are common. Garbage bags hang everywhere. There is the smell of dirt in one tier and of medicine in another.

“Does anyone want an apple?” asked Supervisor Mike Antonovich as the party passed a half-eaten one.

As the party neared the cell in 3600 block where Steven Prendergast was beaten to death Dec. 8 by two drunk inmates, the volume of swearing by inmates intensified.

“That is where his head was smashed repeatedly against the wall,” said Peavy, pointing to the corner of a four-man cell.

In the block where Kristopher Faye was stabbed to death, tattooed and shirtless inmates flashed gang signs and clung to the bars as Peavy described Faye’s killing. An African American, his sin was to use a phone reserved for Latinos.

To illustrate how two suspects were able to get into a locked cell with other 50 inmates on Oct. 21 and kill Ki Chul Hong, whose body was later found in a laundry basket, a sheriff’s lieutenant reached through the mesh of a guard’s cage with a broom handle and touched the electronic lock button.