Two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives have been charged in connection with falsehoods prosecutors allege they made about a 2018 drug bust and arrest.
Det. Pedro Guerrero-Gonzalez, a lead investigator with the department’s gang unit, participated in the search of an East Los Angeles home that produced contraband firearms and amounts of controlled substances like heroin and meth, according to The Los Angeles Times.
During the course of that search, another detective, Jason McGinty, claims Guerrero-Gonzalez asked him to say he had seen one of the arrestees holding a rifle before throwing it to the floor.
“I told him no, that that’s not what happened and that I wasn’t going to say that,” McGinty testified before a closed grand jury in May.
Detectives found the rifle stowed away in its case; neither of the suspects involved in the arrest had touched it, McGinty said.
Still, Guerrero-Gonzalez wrote in an arrest report that McGinty indeed made the claim about the suspect holding the rifle, the L.A. district attorney’s office contended.
A second Sheriff’s Department detective, Noel Lopez, also included allegedly false details in a sworn declaration related to the case, prosecutors said. McGinty told the grand jury that Lopez also asked him to make false statements about the circumstances surrounding the arrest.
Guerrero-Gonzalez faces one felony county of filing a false report and Lopez faces a single county of perjury. Both have pleaded not guilty, with Lopez claiming he overheard McGinty tell a third party that one of the suspects had either been holding or throwing a gun prior to arrest.
Vicki Podbereky, attorney for Guerrero-Gonzalez, told The Times that the grand jury did not hear testimony from other deputies involved in the 2018 drug bust, and suggested what they’d have to say would poke holes in prosecutors’ case.
Lopez’s attorney Joshua Ritter described the case as a part of a “politically motivated” strategy by District Attorney George Gascón’s office to make good on certain campaign-trail promises to hold L.A. law enforcement accountable.