Inside the LA county Sheriffs Office there are clicks of Cop gangs. The Reapers, Vikings, Death Squad and Raiders. They all cover up for each others assaults, drug dealing and murder for hire. Deputies Rockwell and Sanders were the most recent additions and eager to “earn their patch” for helping to conceal a murder. The Cop gangs used to be strictly white supremacist but over the years have expanded their recruiting to Korean and African American cops with a mean streak.
The Reapers watched each others backs and functioned with a military hierarchy. The South West division had a bad reputation for torture, sexual assault and suspicious deaths in the jail. Many of the gang unit cops operate with the same code of silence as the mafia. Their track record has not gone unnoticed by the community. Bumper stickers, activist graffiti and protests have been alarming the closely knit gangs. Conspiratorial dealings only work with a lack of oversight and bad press. Thorns in their side would be dealt with cruelly and deffinatively.
Susanna Dominguez was the local activist. She had published several books on Chicano art, Mexican rural culture and injustices involving underserved communities where police were prone to frame local gang leaders for any crime that comes across their desk. A news report on her work Pro-bono for condemned inmates with compelling evidence of innocence got her on a list to be silenced. Coming home from a meeting with several families of police brutality deaths, she was pulled over for a broken taillight.
The report said she became hostile and had some history with the officers involved. She was arrested and by the next morning was found dead. A rape kit was never done, blood tests showed high levels of opioids despite having no history of hard drug use. Her body was quietly cremated as indigent and family was never contacted until her ailing mother had some up from Calexico with her two brothers when she hadn’t been heard from for weeks. Despite being on record as being arrested, she was listed as a Jane Doe.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
This was where Rockwell and Sanders “eared their bones.” Susanna was from a poor first generation migrants. She was a national scholar award winner in high school and obtained several degrees in college. Her books sold well and despite having been translated to 11 languages she still lived in the barrio. Owning a local taqueria and screen printing business. She employed 2 dozen undocumented families and helped organize charity drives for childhood cancer.
Despite being a beloved icon, her death was swept under the rug by the local news media.The autopsy read as “over dose,” but bruises on her arms and neck suggest she was manhandled, this was never put in the fabricated ME report. Only people who could have opened the cell and turned off the lights in her section were the Deputies who claimed to have checked on her and left the section to play cards with the other Deputies on shift.
Rockwell and Sanders were excited for their full back tattoo of the click, The Reapers. They sprung a local cholo tattoo artist named Chuche who was in custody for a gun charge. In return for fumbling the paperwork and dropping his bail to a meager sum, they extorted him for his high quality black and grey art work. The Reapers symbol was a hooded angel of death wielding a scythe, surrounded by tombstones.
By 3 am the tattoos outlines were completed but they would need another appointment for shading and small details that the deputies couldn’t stand to sit for. The whole time they joked about the murder of Susanna Dominguez, how she threatened legal trouble, she begged and pled when she realized they were going to administer a fatal hotshot. Their first plan was to drown her in the metal toilet in the cell but she was too ravenous and despite being two large men with athletic builds, she left both of them with scratches they had to hide from their wives.
This was a common ploy of the Sheriffs gangs. Any time there was a problem with dope fiends breaking into cars, taggers straying outside the ghetto or local biker gangs trying to set up shop… their answer was staged suicide. This had been going on since the 1950’s but the current clicks originated by returning Vietnam vets adopting the mascot of their in country units, but with a gangster flare. In plain clothes these Sheriffs might be mistaken for gang members with bald heads, urban dress and sinister tattoos. There is always a look to cops, Hawaiian shirts or Italian suits copied from the tv show Miami Vice. There was the old guard with the village people mustaches, but the new guys looked like they stepped out of a Cypress Hill music video.