Several Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies have been relieved of duty for their alleged roles in covering up the beating of an innocent transgender motorist by a fellow officer, the Los Angeles Times reports.
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Joseph Benza III, 36, pleaded guilty in December to one felony count of deprivation of rights for an incident in February 2023 where he followed the man in his car for nearly two miles before brutally assaulting him once he parked, the Department of Justice announced last month.
“It is deeply troubling that a member of our department, who has since been relieved of duty, violated the trust placed in them to uphold the law by abusing their authority,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert G. Luna said in a statement last month. “These actions undermine the integrity of our department, the trust of our community, and the safety of those we are sworn to protect.”
Multiple sources confirmed for the Times that up to eight officers have subsequently been relieved of duties as punishment for their roles in the coverup of Benza’s attack.
The victim, Emmett Brock, was 23 and weighed about half as much as Benza. Benza admitted that he became enraged after Brock drove by the scene of another case he was responding to and flipped the officer off — something legally protected under the First Amendment — prompting him to abandon the case and pursue Brock in his car for 1.8 miles.
Courtesy Emmett Brock via NBC News
Brock called law enforcement to report that he was being followed. When he pulled into a parking lot in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, Benza grabbed him without speaking to him, and then “violently body slammed Victim [Brock] onto the ground,” according to authorities. “Once Victim E.B. was on the ground, defendant Benza mounted Victim E.B., punched Victim E.B.’s head and face multiple times, and pressed Victim E.B.’s face into the pavement.”
Brock was arrested and initially charged with three felonies for the incident that left him suffering from a “concussion, contusions and abrasions,” according to court documents. The charges were later reduced to two misdemeanors and then dropped altogether following the release of surveillance video contradicting the official version of the incident. Brock lost his job as a schoolteacher because of the incident.
In July of 2023, Brock told the Times he was driving home from work when he saw Benza by the side of the road engaged in a heated discussion with a woman.
Brock admitted he flipped his middle finger at Benza, saying he was upset about being sexually harassed earlier that day at work. Brock said he doubted the officer would see it. At the time, Benza was responding to a domestic violence call, but he admitted in his plea agreement that he immediately left that scene to pursue and retaliate against Benza for the insulting gesture.
When Brock pulled into the convenience store parking lot, Benza followed and used his vehicle to block him into the parking space. Surveillance video from the convenience store synched with the deputy’s recordings showed Emmett calmly speaking to Benza when the deputy attacked.
local surveillance footage via KTLA News
“You’re going to kill me,” Brock screams in the video as Benza body slams him into the ground and pounds his head into the asphalt. “You’re going to f*ck*ng kill me. Help! Help! Help!”
The attack made headlines in July 2023 when local media began circulating video of the attack. Benza sent a group text message to two other deputies, identified as Deputy C and Deputy D by the DOJ, in which they “discussed the need to delete text messages on their personal cellphones in light of the anticipated federal investigation,” according to a charging document from the U.S. Attorney’s office.
“Three days later, Deputy C sent a text message to the same group to relay Sergeant 1’s instruction for defendant BENZA to ‘toss the phone,’ a directive to delete data from defendant BENZA’s personal cellphone,” the document says.
“Before Deputy C’s interview with the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office (‘USAO’) in September 2024, Deputy C and defendant BENZA discussed lying to federal authorities in order to provide an innocuous explanation for their text messages about Sergeant 1’s directive to ‘dump’ the cellphone, including to falsely characterize the message as an instruction to ‘dump’ the cellphone into the cloud to preserve the data,” it continues. “Deputy C later confirmed to defendant BENZA that Deputy C planned to adopt that false explanation when speaking with federal authorities.”
Benza initially claimed he pulled over Brock because of an illegal air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror and that he only punched Brock repeatedly and bashed his head into the pavement because Brock bit him and because he feared for his safety.
“My punches had their intended effect,” Benza wrote in his report on the incident, which he now admits was falsified to cover up his illegal actions.
Benza is expected in court in the coming days. There is no word on whether charges will be brought against the sheriffs relieved of duty for their alleged roles in the coverup.
