Former Inmate Tells of Ordeal at Vista Jail

When Joseph Guarino got out of jail in March, he went to the local office of the Veterans Administration, where he was referred to the agency’s “victim of a violent crime program” to help defray his $3,000 in medical and rehabilitation costs.

Guarino says he is the victim of a crime committed by San Diego County sheriff’s deputies.

Guarino, arrested March 11 for failure to appear in court on an assault charge, said he was taken to the County Jail in Vista and beaten by deputies, stripped naked and left for almost eight hours in a dark and dirty holding cell. He said he was released from jail six days later. Two doctors diagnosed him as having suffered a concussion.

“I feel dizzy a lot,” he said. “I’m a construction worker, but now I’m scared of heights. I get so dizzy that I can’t even drive a car.”

Guarino is one of more than 50 current and former San Diego County Jail inmates who are alleging they were beaten by deputies. He said he has filed a complaint with the Sheriff’s Department and is also taking his case to the FBI and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sheriff John Duffy did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, and sheriff’s spokesmen have refused to discuss individual complaints by inmates.

Refused to Sign

Guarino, 35, of Vista said deputies told him he was under arrest for failing to appear in court. But he maintains that he never received a notice to appear in the case in which he is charged with assaulting his former employer at an Oceanside construction company.

He said deputies demanded that he sign arrest forms and be fingerprinted. He refused, demanding instead that the deputies show him a statement of probable cause for his arrest.

He said a deputy “ripped open the cell door and pulled me down with one of his buddies into this rubber room.”

“When I got in there, he slammed my head against the wall,” Guarino said. “He said, ‘Look, I don’t have time to hear about your constitutional rights.’ ”

Likened to a Poe Horror

He described the rubber room as “something out of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ ”

“An open toilet in the floor reeked of urine and stool,” he said. “I was afraid of being in there for what disease I might possibly catch.”

That night, he said, a sergeant and two deputies moved him again.

“They put me in arm- and wrist-lock holds and bent me over and ran me across the room, headfirst into a steel toilet,” he said. “I blacked out, and, if they weren’t holding on to me, I would have passed out on the ground.

‘I Fell to My Knees’

“I fell to my knees. They started laughing. Then they took me out of there, crashing against the walls. They slammed me against the wall, right outside the holding area. They took me back into the rubber room and stripped me naked.”

He said a female jail nurse visited him in the cell, embarrassing him because he was naked. He said he asked for clothes but received none.

Finally--hungry, tired and in pain--he gave in.

“You guys have got me scared to death!” he said he screamed at the deputies. “If it’s going to take fingerprints to get clothes, I’m willing to do that!”

He said that he appeared in court Friday on the pending assault charge and that he still is haunted by the sight of the jail building.

“When I was there, I never saw such a bunch of poor, misguided individuals,” he said. “And here I am referring to the inmates. Some are psychotic and they are criminals.

“But the people who really scared me were the deputies. They had some really scary-looking eyes.”