For more than two hours, Emmett Brock waited outside a Downey courtroom. He sat, he stood, he fidgeted, he paced in the emptying hallway. Finally, he heard his name and went inside.
It was March 8, 2024, exactly 392 days after he’d been beaten by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in front of a 7-Eleven, then arrested and accused of biting the lawman who pummeled him. Afterward, he’d been sent to the Norwalk station lockup and booked for three felonies and a misdemeanor. By the time prosecutors dropped the case seven months later, he’d 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 lawyer 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 walked out an innocent man.
Just over a week later, he filed a federal lawsuit accusing the deputy of “felony crimes” and alleging the department had covered them up.
“I can finally exhale,” Brock told The Times after learning of the judge’s decision. “It felt like I’d been holding my breath for over a year.”
Even if the new developments bring some peace of mind for the Whittier man, they could signal trouble for the deputy who arrested him. When Deputy Joseph Benza made the February 2023 arrest, he signed a declaration under penalty of perjury saying Brock had bitten him.
At this month’s hearing, Kitahara determined there was “no evidence” of that.
Benza is “susceptible to being decertified,” said Brock’s attorney, Thomas Beck, suggesting the deputy could lose his California peace officer certification for alleged dishonesty and be banned from working in law enforcement. “And on the use-of-force issue, he could be prosecuted.”
According to documents Beck filed in court, the FBI has been looking into the case since last year. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office confirmed to The Times this week that local prosecutors are reviewing the matter as well.
Attorney Tom Yu, who is representing Benza, has maintained for months that his client did not do anything wrong. And records show a Sheriff’s Department review last year cleared the deputy’s use of force.
“I wholeheartedly 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 throw all of the suspect’s claims out during this litigation.”
The Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Monday that it had not been served with the lawsuit but confirmed the incident had been investigated and the findings are under review.
“Our top priority is the safety of everyone involved in any encounter,” the statement said.
On the morning of Feb. 10, 2023, Brock had just left work at Frontier High School when he spotted a deputy who appeared to be berating a woman on the side of the road. As he drove by, Brock casually threw up his middle finger, thinking the deputy wouldn’t see it.
Emmett Brock was driving home from his job as a teacher when he was stopped and beaten by a deputy outside of a 7-Eleven.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
According to the lawsuit filed this week, the deputy abandoned the roadside confrontation, hopped in his cruiser and started tailing Brock. Each time Brock made a turn, the cruiser mirrored his move — but the deputy inside didn’t turn on the lights or sirens and didn’t try to pull him over, Brock said.
Fearing he was being followed by someone impersonating a police officer, Brock called 911 and asked what to do.
“If he hasn’t pulled you over, he hasn’t pulled you over,” the dispatcher said, according to a recording of the call shared with The Times.
But a few minutes later, Brock pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot on Mills Avenue in Whittier. As he stepped out to buy a drink, the deputy approached him.
“I just stopped you,” Benza said, without explaining why.
“No, you didn’t,” Brock replied, according to an audio recording captured by the deputy’s body camera.
“Yeah, I did,” the deputy said, grabbing Brock’s arm. The deputy then “overwhelmed young Brock,” according to the lawsuit, and “without uttering another word, violently took Brock to the pavement.”
For the next three minutes Brock struggled as the deputy held him down, all of it captured on the 7-Eleven’s surveillance camera.
“You’re going to kill me! You’re going to f— kill me,” Brock shouted, screaming for the deputy to stop.
“Instead Benza rained at least 10 closed fist punches at Brock’s head and face,” the suit says, “while Benza used his greater body weight to pin the plaintiff to the ground as he continued to angrily pummel Brock with both fists, scraping his knuckles in the process.”
After Brock was in handcuffs, the deputy put him into the back seat of his cruiser. Brock was bloodied and his glasses were broken but, according to the lawsuit, the deputy still hadn’t explained why he’d stopped him.
When a sergeant arrived on scene, Brock told him he’d been beaten in retaliation for giving a deputy the finger — an act that could have been a violation of the department’s policy explicitly banning the use of force in retaliation for disrespect.
“Instead of immediately recognizing Benza had committed a felony crime of assault against Brock,” the suit said, the sergeant “purposefully ignored plaintiff’s complaints and took no action.”
As other deputies arrived, Benza showed them his bruised knuckles and blamed Brock — but he didn’t say anything about being bitten, according to the lawsuit. When paramedics arrived, the suit says, he didn’t tell them anything about a bite, either.
Before leaving to go back to the station, Benza and several sergeants walked into the 7-Eleven, according to a 32-page innocence petition Beck filed in court on Brock’s behalf. The lawmen went into the store’s camera room and stayed there for a little over 10 minutes, “presumably screening the audio-free 7-Eleven video recording of the assault,” Beck wrote in the petition.
“With knowledge of this damaging evidence,” Beck continued, the deputy drove back to the station and “falsely reported” to a supervisor that he’d only thrown punches because Brock had bitten his hands.
Then, the petition says, Benza went to urgent care and said he’d been bitten on his right hand — though the physician assistant who treated him wrote in his report that there was bruising but “no bite marks.”
After he left urgent care, Benza filed his declaration under penalty of perjury saying he’d been bitten on his left hand. He said the incident started when he’d been on a routine patrol and decided to stop Brock after spotting an air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. He left out any mention of stopping a woman on the side of the road and said nothing about Brock giving him the finger.
In an interview with The Times last year, Benza’s attorney said that’s because the person Brock passed on the side of the road wasn’t his client, but another law enforcement officer probably from another agency.
Now, Beck said, there’s evidence to disprove that.
“I have been advised that the FBI has downloaded Benza’s cell phone GPS data and was able to corroborate Mr. Brock’s claim of being pursued along the route Benza claimed he never took,” Beck wrote in the innocence petition. (The FBI told The Times this week that it does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.)
When he was taken to the Norwalk station for booking — on offenses including mayhem and injuring an officer while resisting arrest — Brock was asked to give a statement, during which he explained he is transgender. One jailer asked if he was a girl, he said, and another asked to see his genitals before deciding to put him in a women’s holding cell.
Though 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 reached out, handing over some of the materials he hadn’t been able to get from the Sheriff’s Department and asking to interview Brock. With the new materials, Beck filed a petition asking a court to declare his client innocent.
Now in graduate school, Brock showed up to the hearing this month flanked by his mother, several classmates and a professor. Dressed in a black suit and a green tie, he stood in front of a judge as his lawyer explained the case, arguing for a declaration of “factual innocence.” The prosecutor agreed, and the judge entered a tentative ruling finalized last week.
“Though I am happy that I am factually innocent, I don’t think it will ever be over for me in my heart,” Brock told The Times. “It’s something that I still think about every single day.”
Keri Blakinger
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