Jeff Adechi said at least four deputies threatened the inmates with violence or withheld food if they did not fight each other, gladiator-style, for the entertainment of the deputies.
The ringleader in the fights was, according to Adachi, Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to perform sexual acts on him.
“I don’t know why he does it, but I just feel like he gets a kick out of it because I just see the look on his face,” Rico Palikiko Garcia, one of the inmates forced to fight, told SFGate. “It looks like it brings him joy by doing this, while we’re suffering by what he’s doing,”
Garcia said earlier this month he was twice forced to fight another inmate, Stanley Harris. The fight was so brutal that Garcia said he may have fractured his ribs and was unable to sleep on his right side because of the pain.
“They took me down to the hallway and told me to fight … Stanley, and told me if I didn’t fight that I would basically get beat up by themselves, by Deputy Neu,” Garcia said. “And he told me he was going to Mace me and cuff me if I didn’t.”
When Harris, who Deputy Neu apparently bet on, lost the fight, Neu said he would visit Harris’ cell the next day to train, according to Garcia.
“And [Neu] also told everyone that was there that there will be a round two and he does not like to lose money,” Garcia recalled in an interview with SFGate.
Harris, in a recorded conversation with Adachi, said Neu once made him do 200 push-ups within an hour as part of “training.”
The allegations came to light after Garcia’s father asked his attorney to intervene. The public defender’s office then hired a private investigator to look into the claims. In the investigator’s report, Harris and Garcia said the deputies threatened to take them off their kitchen jobs and or send them to a jail among more dangerous inmates.
Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said he was “extremely disturbed” when he learned of the allegations, adding that the department’s criminal investigation unit was taking steps to look into the matter.
“I do not accept any kind of culture within our county jail system that would resort to such barbaric or unlawful activity as these deputies have demonstrated,” he said.
“I’m going to reach out to the federal government. I’m going to reach out to the U.S. Department of Justice, and I’m going to invite them to come in and help us in the investigation, and I want to ask them that they also work with us in identifying if in fact that that culture remains deep.”
The deputies in question have been reassigned to positions with no inmate contact, while Harris and Garcia have been transferred to another San Francisco jail for their protection.
