For more than two hours, Emmett Brock waited outside the Downey courtroom. He sat, stood, fidgeted, and paced down the empty hall. Finally he heard his name and entered.
That was March 8, 2024, exactly 392 days after he was beaten by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy in front of a 7-Eleven, then arrested and charged for biting the lawman who beat him. After that, he was sent to Norwalk Station Jail and booked on three felonies and a misdemeanor. By the time prosecutors dropped the case seven months later, he had already lost his high school teaching job.
It had been a traumatic year, and to put it behind him, Brock wanted a judge to declare him innocent. His attorney has filed the papers, and now Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Evan Kitahara will make a decision on the request.
Twenty minutes after entering the courtroom, Brock walked out an innocent man.
A little more than a week later, he filed a federal lawsuit accusing the representative of “criminal offenses” and alleging the department covered them up.
“I can finally breathe,” Brock told The Times after learning of the judge’s decision. “I felt like I was holding my breath for over a year.”
Even if the new developments bring some peace of mind to the Whittier man, they may signal trouble for the deputy who arrested him. When Deputy Joseph Penza made the arrest in February 2023, he signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury saying Brock had bitten him.
At a hearing this month, Kitahara decided there was “no evidence” of that.
Brock's attorney, Thomas Beck, said Benza is “subject to decertification,” noting that the deputy could lose his certification as a California peace officer for the alleged dishonesty and be barred from working in law enforcement. “On the issue of use of force, he can be prosecuted.”
According to documents Beck submitted 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 also reviewing the matter.
Attorney Tom Yu, who represents Penza, has maintained for months that his client did nothing wrong. A Sheriff's Department review last year authorized the deputy's use of force, records show.
“I completely disagree with Mr. Beck’s account of what happened,” Yu wrote to The Times in an email. “I am confident that the federal judge will dismiss all of the suspect’s claims during this lawsuit.”
The Sheriff's Department said in a statement Monday that it had not been notified of the lawsuit but confirmed that the incident had been investigated and the findings were under review.
The statement said: “Our top priority is the safety of all participants in any confrontation.”
On the morning of February 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 raised his middle finger, thinking the deputy wouldn't see it.
Emmett Brock was driving home from his job as a teacher when a deputy stopped him and beat him outside a 7-Eleven.
(Irrfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
According to the lawsuit filed this week, the deputy abandoned the roadside confrontation, jumped into his vehicle and began following Brock. Every time Brock made a turn, the cruiser mirrored his movement — but the deputy inside didn't turn on the lights or sirens or try to stop him, Brock said.
Fearing that someone impersonating a police officer would follow him, Brock called 911 and asked what to do.
“If he didn’t pull you over, he didn’t pull 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 Street in Whittier. When he went out to buy a drink, the deputy approached him.
“I just stopped you,” Penza said, without explaining why.
“No, you didn’t,” Brock replied, according to an audio recording captured by the deputy’s body camera.
“Yes, I did,” the deputy said, grabbing Brock's arm. According to the lawsuit, the deputy “overpowered Young Brock,” and “without another word, violently took Brock to the sidewalk.”
For the next three minutes, Brock struggled as the deputy grabbed him, all of which was captured on a 7-Eleven surveillance camera.
“You're going to kill me! You're going to kill me,” Brock shouted, screaming for the deputy to stop.
“Instead, Benza rained down at least 10 fist punches to Brock's head and face, while Benza used the greater weight of his body to pin Plaintiff to the ground while he continued to angrily strike Brock with both fists, scraping his knuckles,” the suit says. In treatment.”
After Brock was handcuffed, the deputy placed him in the back seat of his cruiser. Brock was covered in blood and his glasses were broken, but according to the lawsuit, the deputy did not explain why he was stopped.
When a sergeant arrived at the scene, Brock told him he was beaten in retaliation for giving a deputy the finger — an act that would have been a violation of department policy that expressly prohibits the use of force in retaliation for disrespect.
“Instead of immediately admitting that Penza had committed an assault on Brock, the sergeant intentionally ignored Plaintiff’s complaints and took no action,” the lawsuit states.
As other deputies arrived, Benza showed them his bruised knuckles and blamed Brock, but said nothing about being bitten, according to the lawsuit. When paramedics arrived, he didn't tell them anything about the bite either, the suit says.
Before leaving to return to the station, Benza and several sergeants entered a 7-Eleven, according to the 32-page acquittal petition that Beck filed in court on Brock's behalf. “The law enforcement officers entered the store’s camera room and remained there for a little over 10 minutes,” Beck wrote in the petition, “presumably examining the 7-Eleven audio-free video recording of the assault.”
“Knowing this damaging evidence, the deputy returned to the station and ‘falsely informed’ a supervisor that he had only thrown the punches because Brock had bitten his hands,” Beck continued.
Then, the petition says, Benza went to urgent care and said he was bitten on his right hand — although the physician assistant who treated him wrote in his report that there was bruising but “no bite marks.”
After he left the urgent care, Benza entered a plea under penalty of perjury saying he was bitten on his left hand. He said the incident began when he was on routine patrol and decided to stop Brock after he saw the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. He left out any mention of stopping a woman on the side of the road and said nothing about Brooke pointing the finger at him.
In an interview with The Times last year, Benza's lawyer said it was because the person Brock passed on the side of the road was not his client, but another law enforcement officer, perhaps from another agency.
Now, Beck said, there is evidence to disprove that.
“I have been informed that the FBI downloaded the GPS data from Penza's cell phone and was able to corroborate Mr. Brock's claim that he was followed along a route that Penza claimed he never took,” Beck wrote in the exculpation petition. (The FBI told the Times this week that it neither confirms nor denies the existence of the investigations.)
When he was taken to the Norwalk Station for booking — for crimes including disorderly conduct and wounding an officer while resisting arrest — Brock was asked to give a statement, during which he explained that he was transgender. He said that one of the guards asked him if he was a girl, and another asked to see his genitals before deciding to put him in a women’s detention cell.
Although his family bailed him out, Brock said, he lost his job when state authorities notified the school of his arrest. Prosecutors initially charged him with two misdemeanors, but dropped the case in August.
Beck said federal prosecutors contacted him last fall, turning over some materials he couldn't get from the Sheriff's Department and requesting an interview with Brock. Using the new materials, Beck filed a petition asking the court to declare his client innocent.
Now that Brock is in graduate school, he attended the hearing this month surrounded by his mother, several classmates and a professor. Wearing a black suit and green tie, he stood before the judge while his lawyer explained the case and demanded a declaration of “actual innocence.” The prosecutor agreed, and the judge issued a preliminary ruling that was finalized last week.
“Even though I'm glad I'm actually innocent, I don't think in my heart it will ever be over for me,” Brock told the Times. “It's something I still think about every day.”
