WTF?  I just don’t get this one. The personnel file of a deputy, accused of encouragning the beating death of an inmate in the Orange County Jail has gone “missing.” In the middle of a high profile investigation, and civil litigation how do you lose potential evidence?
The Orange County Register has the report here, but this one doesn’t even pass the sniff test.
The Department has this to say:
Sheriff’s officials discovered the file was missing last year, Capt. Dave Nighswonger said Wednesday. It included Taylor’s past records from the Torrance Police Department.
“It is unusual we would lose a file,†Nighswonger said. “And the fact that it’s the primary deputy involved does look suspicious. … But there is nothing in the file we would want to hide.â€Â
What do you think?ÂÂ
“It is unusual we would lose a file,†Nighswonger said.
Do we suspect the file wasn’t lost at all? Or should we find out whether they have shoddy recordkeeping, and have all kinds of missing files? I wouldn’t be surprised if an investigation of their recordkeeping found many files missing, it could just be the case that they don’t know it’s missing until they have a need to look at it. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised either if the record was purposely “lost”.
The article reads, “the file (missing) excludes allegations of run-ins from Taylor’s tenure at Sheriff’s Department jails. Those records, in separate files, were turned over to prosecutors during their ongoing special grand jury probe. He declined to comment on the existence of any such complaints.†Why doesn’t this murderer’s attorney, Martin J. Heneghan, get this missing files from Torrance Police Department? I’m sure they kept their copy. Seems simple enough to me.