For more than two hours, Emmett Brock waited outside a Downey courtroom. He would sit down, get up, fidget, and pace down the emptying hallway. He finally heard his name and entered.
It was March 8, 2024, exactly 392 days later had been beaten by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy outside a 7-Eleven, then arrested and accused of biting the police officer who hit him. He was then sent to the Norwalk station lockup and charged with three felonies and one misdemeanor. By the time prosecutors dropped the case seven months later, he had already lost his high school teaching job.
It had been a painful year and, to put it behind him, Brock wanted a judge to declare him innocent. His attorney had filed the paperwork and now Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Evan Kitahara was going to decide on the request.
Twenty minutes after entering the courtroom, Brock emerged an innocent man.
A little more than a week later, he filed a federal lawsuit accusing the congressman of “serious crimes” and claiming that the department had covered them up.
“I can finally exhale,” Brock told The Times after learning of the judge's decision. “I felt like I had been holding my breath for over a year.”
Even if the new developments bring some comfort to the Whittier man, they could signal trouble for the arresting officer. When Deputy Joseph Benza made the arrest in February 2023, he signed a statement under penalty of perjury saying that Brock had bitten him.
At this month's hearing, Kitahara determined there was “no evidence” of this.
Benza is “susceptible to decertification,” said Brock's attorney, Thomas Beck, suggesting the officer could lose his California law enforcement certification for alleged dishonesty and be barred from working in law enforcement. “And as for the use of force, he could be prosecuted.”
According to documents Beck filed in court, the FBI has been investigating the case since last year. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office confirmed to the Times this week that local prosecutors are also reviewing the matter.
Attorney Tom Yu, who represents Benza, has maintained for months that his client did nothing wrong. And records show that a Sheriff's Department review last year authorized the officer's use of force.
“I strongly disagree with Mr. Beck's representation of what occurred,” Yu wrote to the Times in an email. “I am confident that the federal judge will dismiss all of the suspect's claims during this litigation.”
The Sheriff's Department said in a statement Monday that it had not been served with the lawsuit, but confirmed that the incident had been investigated and that the findings are under review.
“Our top priority is the safety of everyone involved in any encounter,” the statement said.
On the morning of February 10, 2023, Brock had just left work at Frontier High School when he saw an officer who appeared to be berating a woman on the side of the road. As he walked by, Brock casually raised his middle finger, thinking the officer wouldn't see it.
Emmett Brock was driving home from his teaching job when an officer stopped him and punched him outside a 7-Eleven.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
According to the lawsuit filed this week, the officer abandoned the roadside confrontation, got into his patrol car, and began following Brock. Every time Brock made a turn, the patrol car mimicked his movement, but the officer inside didn't turn on his lights or sirens and didn't try to stop him, Brock said.
Fearing he was being followed by someone posing as a police officer, Brock called 911 and asked what to do.
“If he hasn't stopped you, he hasn't stopped you,” the dispatcher said, according to a recording of the call shared with The Times.
But a few minutes later, Brock pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Mills Avenue in Whittier. When he went out to buy a drink, the agent approached him.
“I just stopped you,” Benza said, without explaining why.
“No, you didn't,” Brock responded, according to an audio recording captured by the officer's body camera.
“Yes, I did,” the agent said, grabbing Brock's arm. The officer then “overwhelmed young Brock,” according to the lawsuit, and “without saying another word, violently pulled Brock to the sidewalk.”
For the next three minutes, Brock struggled as the officer held him down, all captured on the 7-Eleven's surveillance camera.
“You're going to kill me! You’re going to kill me,” Brock yelled, yelling at the officer to stop.
“Instead, Benza threw at least 10 closed punches to Brock's head and face,” the lawsuit says, “while Benza used his greater body weight to pin Plaintiff to the ground while continuing to furiously punch Brock with both fists, scraping his knuckles. in the process.”
After Brock was handcuffed, the officer put him in the back seat of his patrol car. Brock was bloodied and his glasses were broken, but, according to the lawsuit, the officer still had not explained why he had stopped him.
When a sergeant arrived on the scene, Brock told him that he had been beaten in retaliation for giving the finger to an officer, an act that could have been a violation of department policy that explicitly prohibits the use of force in retaliation for misconduct. of respect.
“Instead of immediately acknowledging that Benza had committed felony assault against Brock,” the lawsuit said, the sergeant “intentionally ignored plaintiff's complaints and took no action.”
When other officers arrived, Benza showed them his bruised knuckles and blamed Brock, but said nothing about being bitten, according to the lawsuit. When paramedics arrived, the lawsuit says, he also didn't tell them anything about a bite.
Before returning to the station, Benza and several sergeants entered the 7-Eleven, according to a 32-page not guilty petition Beck filed in court on Brock's behalf. Law enforcement officers entered the store's camera room and remained there for a little more than 10 minutes, “presumably screening the audio-free video recording of the assault at the 7-Eleven,” Beck wrote in the petition.
“With knowledge of this damaging evidence,” Beck continued, the officer drove back to the station and “falsely reported” to a supervisor that he had only thrown punches because Brock had bitten his hands.
Then, the petition says, Benza went to urgent care and said his right hand had been bitten, although the medical assistant who treated him wrote in his report that there were bruises but “no bite marks.”
After leaving urgent care, Benza entered his statement under penalty of perjury saying he had been bitten on his left hand. He said the incident began when he was on a routine patrol and decided to pull Brock over after seeing an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. He omitted any mention of stopping a woman on the side of the road and said nothing about Brock pointing the finger at him.
In an interview with The Times last year, Benza's attorney said that was because the person Brock passed on the side of the road was not his client, but another law enforcement officer likely from another agency.
Now, Beck said, there is evidence to disprove it.
“I was informed that the FBI downloaded GPS data from Benza's cell phone and was able to corroborate Mr. Brock's claim of being followed along the route Benza claimed he never took,” Beck wrote in the not guilty petition. (The FBI told the Times this week that it neither confirms nor denies the existence of investigations.)
When taken to the Norwalk station to be booked (for crimes including mayhem and injuring an officer while resisting arrest), Brock was asked to make a statement, during which he explained that he is transgender. One jailer asked him if she was a girl, he told him, and another asked to see his genitals before deciding to put him in a women's holding cell.
Although his family bailed him out, Brock said, he lost his job when state authorities notified the school of his arrest. County prosecutors initially charged him with two misdemeanors but dropped the case in August.
Last fall, Beck said, federal prosecutors approached him, gave him some of the materials he had been unable to obtain from the Sheriff's Department and asked him to interview Brock. With the new materials, Beck filed a petition asking a court to find his client innocent.
Now in graduate school, Brock showed up to this month's hearing flanked by his mother, several classmates and a professor. Dressed in a black suit and green tie, he stood in front of a judge as his attorney explained the case, asking for a declaration of “factual innocence.” The prosecutor agreed and the judge issued a finalized interim ruling last week.
“While I'm happy to be innocent, I don't think in my heart this will ever end,” Brock told The Times. “It's something I still think about every day.”
