black man

LA QUINTA — Briana Ortega had been home for all of three minutes when she heard a fist pounding against her door.

She opened it to find a Riverside County sheriff’s deputy “claiming a black man with dreadlocks had jumped over her backyard fence” and was trying to break into her La Quinta home, according to court records.

Almost immediately, Ortega, 29, suspected Deputy Eric Piscatella was there for other reasons. The encounter last summer wasn’t the first time they’d met. It wasn’t even the first time he’d shown up at her home unannounced, according to an arrest affidavit and claims in a civil lawsuit.

“You look pretty without makeup … sorry I don’t mean to be rude or unprofessional,” Piscatella said, after spending a scant few seconds looking out a window for the purported suspect, according to a recording of the incident.

It was the fourth time in less than a year that Piscatella had either shown up at Ortega’s home or contacted her without a legitimate law enforcement purpose, according to the affidavit and lawsuit. Ortega shared text messages showing the deputy tried to flirt with her and ask her out on dates, but she rebuffed him at every turn.

A former Riverside County sheriff’s deputy is accused in a lawsuit of using law enforcement resources to pursue a woman he met at a public event.

(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)

Last year, Riverside County prosecutors charged Piscatella, 30, with seven counts of illegally using law enforcement databases to look up information about Ortega.

But instead of resolving the situation, Ortega says, the way Piscatella’s case played out in criminal court has only prolonged her ordeal.

Ortega said she remains “terrified” of Piscatella and declined to testify against him. In July, a Riverside County judge downgraded all charges against Piscatella to misdemeanors. He pleaded guilty and received probation, avoiding jail time.

Last month, Ortega filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Piscatella, the department and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate in the 2026 governor’s race.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco kicks off his campaign to run for governor at Avila’s Historic 1929 center on Feb. 17 in Riverside.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

“I feel like with him getting the misdemeanor, nothing is ever going to change… If it takes me having to [file this lawsuit], I will, if it helps,” she said.

Piscatella declined to comment through his defense attorney.

A spokesperson for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said Piscatella resigned last October after roughly five years on the job. His ability to work as a police officer in California is suspended, accreditation records show, but without a felony conviction it could be restored.

Ortega recalled her first run-in with Piscatella as innocent enough.

She was attending what she described as a “family fair,” with her two sons in Coachella in September 2023, enjoying amusement rides and carnival games when she said her oldest son ran up to a group of sheriff’s deputies who were giving out stickers. Piscatella was among them, according to Ortega, who said they had a polite but forgettable conversation.

They did not exchange contact information, but a few months later, in January of 2024, Ortega said, she got a text from an unknown number.

The texter claimed to be her “personal officer.” A fitness influencer with more than 100,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, Ortega gets random flirtatious messages from men. So she shrugged it off.

That same month, Piscatella searched Ortega’s name and the city of La Quinta in both the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System and other sheriff’s databases shortly before the texts were sent, according to court records. In Ortega’s civil suit, she alleged this was how Piscatella tracked her down.

One month later, Piscatella showed up at Ortega’s La Quinta home while she was at work, according to her lawsuit. Her mother answered the door, and was “alarmed” when the deputy questioned where her daughter was. Still, Ortega wasn’t bothered.

“I’m like, he’s a cop, he can’t be that crazy. He’s on the force for a reason … of course he knows where I live,” she said.

Echoing claims in her lawsuit, she added: “I’m not thinking he’s going to continue to look for me or stalk me. If I would have known, I would have complained.”

Ortega was so unfazed that she actually went to Piscatella for help a month later. Her younger sister had been the victim of an assault and was struggling to get attention from the Sheriff’s Department. So Ortega contacted the man who claimed to be her “personal officer.”

But when Ortega began describing the purported crime, Piscatella responded by asking her to send a “selfie” and insisting they should go to the gym together. Annoyed, Ortega eventually changed her number when instead of help, all she got was a picture of Piscatella wearing Sheriff’s Department clothes, according to text messages.

Court records show Piscatella continued to use law enforcement databases to keep tabs on Ortega in the months that followed. In May 2024, he searched her name and ran her license plate, according to court records. He did the same in July, right before showing up at Ortega’s house, claiming he saw the man with dreadlocks break in.

At that point, Piscatella’s interest in Ortega had turned into an “obsession,” according to her lawsuit. Since he arrived just minutes after she’d returned from a trip to San Diego, Ortega said it felt like Piscatella was “waiting for me.” She alleges in her lawsuit that the deputy “used law enforcement resources and databases … to stalk her.”

After letting him in, she surreptitiously recorded the deputy standing in her living room, talking to her children. In the lawsuit, Ortega said she was “confused, scared and uncomfortable,” especially after Piscatella asked for her new number, which she gave him out of “fear.”

Piscatella texted her a short time later, according to messages reviewed by The Times, describing her kids as “so cool.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with everything that just happened. Please do not contact me again,” Ortega wrote back.

Briana Ortega filed a lawsuit alleging that she has been living in fear of a former Riverside County sheriff’s deputy.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

She made a complaint to the Sheriff’s Department the same day. Court records show the department launched an internal investigation and quickly determined Piscatella had used law enforcement databases to look up information on Ortega several times, according to an affidavit seeking a warrant for his arrest.

The affidavit shows there was “no corresponding call for service” related to the day Piscatella showed up at Ortega’s home and claimed someone was breaking in.

Riverside County prosecutors filed seven felony charges against Piscatella.

Ortega said she refused to testify because, even though the Sheriff’s Department had presented a case against one of their own, she feared Piscatella or a fellow deputy might seek retribution against her.

At a July court hearing in Indio, Piscatella made an open plea to the court seeking to downgrade each charge to a misdemeanor and avoid jail time, according to a transcript of the proceeding.

Riverside County Deputy Dist. Atty. Natasha Sorace pleaded with Superior Court Judge Helios J. Hernandez not to accept the lesser charges.

“The defendant was a police officer — a sheriff’s deputy, who used his position of power and the information he had access to as a result of that position to put someone in the community in significant fear for their safety,” Sorace said.

“He searched information — conducted a search about a particular individual and used that information to come up with an excuse to get into that woman’s house, where he proceeded to hit on her and make her feel uncomfortable in her own on home.”

But Hernandez rebuffed her attempts to argue the point further. In his view, “nothing actually happened.”

“He never, like, broke into the house or threatened her,” Hernandez said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Hernandez sentenced Piscatella to probation and community service and ordered him to stay away from Ortega. Records show prosecutors have appealed the decision.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office would not say if Ortega’s refusal to testify affected their ability to bring other charges, including the stalking allegation she made in the civil suit.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.

The entire ordeal left Ortega feeling like law enforcement failed her at every level. She noted that Piscatella still knows where she lives.

While she previously did not hold a negative view of police, now she says she turns the other direction and grows anxious anytime she sees a Sheriff’s Department cruiser.

“It’s a betrayal of trust from law enforcement … who do you call when it’s the police who are the problem?” asked her attorney, Jamal Tooson. “When can you ever feel safe? You almost feel trapped, in your own house.”

The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General’s Office have entered into an “enforceable agreement” meant to reform the troubled agency following a scandal that led prosecutors to toss dozens of criminal cases linked to officers who sent racist text messages, officials said.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced the reforms — which will include changes to the agency’s use-of-force and internal affairs practices, along with attempts to curtail biased policing — during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday morning.

Bonta credited former Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah Hart with approaching him after the scandal first erupted in 2021, leading to collaborative reform efforts.

“The Torrance Police Department has demonstrated a commitment to self reflection to looking inward … to address systemic challenges,” Bonta said Thursday.

The California Attorney General’s Office announced its Torrance investigation in December 2021, the same day a Times investigation first revealed the contents of the text messages and the names of most of the officers involved. Court records and documents obtained by The Times showed the officers made offensive comments about a wide range of groups. They joked about “gassing” Jewish people, attacking members of the LGBTQ community and using violence against suspects.

The worst comments were saved for Black men and women, who the officers repeatedly called “savages” or referred to with variations of the N-word. One officer shared instructions on how to a tie a noose and posted a picture of a stuffed animal being hung inside police headquarters. Another message referred to the relatives of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, a Black man shot to death by Torrance police in 2018, as “all those [N-word] family members,” according to court records.

Sometimes, the officers blatantly fantasized about the deaths of Black men, women and even kids.

One officer shared pictures of tiny coffins intended to house the bodies of Black children they would “put down.” Another imagined executing Black suspects.

“Lucky I wasn’t out and about,” one officer wrote in response to a text about Black men allegedly involved in a Torrance robbery, according to records reviewed by The Times in 2022. “D.A. shoot team asking me why they are all hung by a noose and shot in the back of the head 8 times each.”

The officers also suggested a political allegiance in their hate-filled text thread. In a conversation about needlessly beating a female suspect, Sgt. Brian Kawamoto said he wanted to “make Torrance great again,” a play on President Trump’s ubiquitous campaign slogan.

The texts were sent between May 2018 and February 2022, according to investigative reports made public by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Bonta said Thursday that roughly a dozen officers were involved in the thread. At least seven of those officers are no longer employed by the agency, according to court records and a POST database.

The group of officers that The Times linked to the texts has been involved in at least seven serious use-of-force incidents in Torrance and Long Beach, including three killings of Black and Latino men, according to police use-of-force records and court filings.

The officers actions were initially found to be justified in each case, though prosecutors later revisited Mitchell’s death and indicted Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez on manslaughter charges.

While Concannon and Chavez were investigated as part of the scandal, The Times has never seen evidence that they sent racist text messages. In the past, authorities have said, some officers under investigation were aware of the texts but did not send any hateful messages themselves.

David Chandler is also awaiting trial on assault charges for shooting a Black man in the back in 2018. In total, five officers linked to the text thread have been charged with crimes.

The scandal may not have come to light if not for the actions of former officers Cody Weldin and Michael Tomsic, who were charged with spray painting a swastika inside of a vehicle that was towed from a crime scene in 2021. That incident prompted former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón to launch an investigation into possible hate crime charges. While a hate enhancement was never charged in the vandalism case, it led to the execution of warrants on the officers’ cellphones that unveiled the texts.

Tomsic and Weldin pleaded guilty to vandalism earlier this year and gave up their right to be police officers in California. Disciplinary records made public earlier this year identified Weldin as the “owner” of the group text in which many of the racist remarks were found. The group was dubbed “The Boys,” records show.

By engaging in “collaborative reform,” Bonta chose the least forceful method of reform in Torrance. Often, the attorney general’s office will seek court-mandated reform through a settlement, as it has with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s and probation departments, so that it may ask a judge to force change if a police agency doesn’t comply.

Bonta is now seeking to take over the county’s juvenile halls after the probation department failed to honor its settlement with the state.

In 2021, Hart personally approached Bonta’s office, seeking to work together on reform, which may have led the attorney general to use a softer method. Interim Police Chief Bob Dunn, who came to Torrance in 2023 after a long career with the Anaheim Police Department, said he believes Hart’s actions should show the department is committed to reform in the wake of the ugly scandal.

“It was the department that identified the behavior, the department that did the investigation and the department that took the case for criminal filing on the initially involved officers,” Dunn said of the city’s reaction to the revelation of the text messages in 2021.

In recent years, Dunn said, the department has taken steps to improve its use-of-force and police pursuit review processes by deploying sergeants to respond to any force incident. The hope, Dunn said, is to collect better information from individual cases that can be used to train officers in deescalation. Hart also created a Chief’s Advisory Panel to collect greater community input on issues facing the department, including bias allegations, according to Dunn.