By: Keri Blakinger | LA Times
When he stepped up to the witness stand last week, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jaime Juarez told the court about his first inking party — the day he got his Compton station tattoo. The intimate gathering was at a home somewhere in Pomona, and most of the people there were strangers.
But he knew the man who invited him, and knew that man sported the same ink Juarez was about to get — a design commonly linked to a suspected deputy gang known as the Executioners.
On Thursday afternoon, while testifying in a civil trial, Juarez pushed up a pant leg to reveal that tattoo: a helmet-wearing skeleton gripping a rifle. The rare and candid disclosure came in a case centered on the secretive world of deputy gangs, reports of which have plagued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for half a century and led to an array of investigations, studies and legal settlements.
Read the full story here.