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BAKER, Calif. — He was somewhere near Baker, well out into the Southern California desert, when the scrum of cherry lights appeared ahead.
It was the sure sign of police cars — a seemingly improbable number for this lonely stretch of windswept road. But behind the wheel of his rented sedan, Sean Kennedy smiled.
He’d found what he was looking for: the relay race.
For Los Angeles law enforcement, the Baker to Vegas footrace is the premiere sporting event of the year — a sort of Super Bowl for the “thin blue line” crowd. Police departments and sheriff’s stations spend months raising the thousands of dollars it takes to send each 20-runner team to the dusty start just north of Baker and on to the glittering finish by the Las Vegas Strip 120 miles later.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department usually sends a couple of dozen teams, some of which are regulars on the winner’s podium. And even for those deputies who don’t limp away victorious, the grueling gathering is a morale booster, a time to bond and a chance to party outside the L.A. County limits.
For Kennedy, it’s an excuse to hunt for deputy gangs. The department has been haunted for years by allegations about violent, tattooed cliques, whose bad behavior has cost the county millions of dollars in legal settlements. After investigating the groups for nearly a decade as part of the county’s Civilian Oversight Commission, Kennedy wanted to seek them out in person.
But instead of deputies in skimpy running gear flashing the offending tattoos, a different problem plaguing the largest sheriff’s department in the nation became apparent.
Los Angeles County has paid out roughly $55 million in settlements since 1990 in civil cases involving allegations that sheriff’s deputies belonged to a secret society, records show.
A few weeks before the race, a Lancaster deputy had been convicted in federal court of violating a Black woman’s civil rights during a 2023 use-of-force incident in a WinCo Foods parking lot. Deputy Trevor Kirk’s supporters urged the department’s runners to boycott the race as a show of solidarity with a man they said had been wrongfully prosecuted.
Among them was former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who has been critical of the department he once ran since he was unseated in the 2022 election by current Sheriff Robert Luna.
The discord spread online, as social media gadflies claimed Luna had thrown his own deputy under the bus by notifying federal law enforcement officials about the incident — an allegation Luna has repeatedly said is false. Still, by late March, more than 20 sheriff’s stations had dropped out, and Kirk’s supporters announced a fundraising 5K to be held in Castaic, one day after the big race to Vegas.
Kennedy planned to go to both. But by the time he was speeding along Interstate 15 on April 5, it wasn’t clear whether he would find what he was looking for at either one.
***
The root of the controversy traces back to a Lancaster grocery store parking lot in June 2023, when two sheriff’s deputies responded to a call about a robbery in progress. After arriving at the scene on West Avenue K4, the deputies spotted a man and a woman — later identified in court filings as Damon Barnes and Jacy Houseton — who matched the descriptions store security had given to 911.
One of the deputies approached Barnes, who was holding a cake federal prosecutors later said he’d bought inside the store. As the deputy began handcuffing Barnes, Houseton started recording with her phone. Video — from both a bystander and the deputies’ body cameras — shows Kirk rushed toward her and reached for her arm, seemingly in an attempt to take the phone.
“You can’t touch me!” she screamed. The two struggled, and a few seconds later the deputy threw Houseton on the ground.
“Stop or you’re gonna get punched in the face!” Kirk shouted. Houseton threatened to sue, telling him she’d caught him on camera.
They continued to tussle, while Houseton shrieked. The deputy pepper-sprayed her in the face and eventually handcuffed her. She was taken to the hospital, then released and cited for allegedly assaulting an officer and store loss prevention personnel.
Within days, the bystander’s cellphone video began circulating online, sparking an outcry on social media. As activists organized a protest demanding the deputy be fired, the Sheriff’s Department released the body camera video. Two days later, Luna held a news conference, calling the incident “disturbing” and announcing that both deputies involved had been removed from field duty.
A few days later, Kirk’s attorney, Tom Yu, waded into the fray, releasing video from inside the store that he said showed Houseton shoving and spitting on a security guard, actions Yu said justified the deputy’s use of force against a combative robbery suspect.
The following month, Houseton and Barnes sued the county, alleging civil rights violations. They said that they never stole anything that day, and that surveillance video showed them paying for their purchases.
The case faded from the news.
***
When two Los Angeles police officers set up the first Baker to Vegas relay in the mid-1980s, it was a small contest of fewer than two dozen teams. Organized by the Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club, the race grew in size and reputation over the next four decades.
These days, it attracts several hundred teams of cops, deputies and prosecutors from across the world, all vying for bragging rights in a 12-plus-hour contest in which victory can come down to a matter of seconds.
“There’s a lot of lore regarding the whole race,” Kennedy said, “and it’s kind of legendary in the Sheriff’s Department.”
Some of the lore is impressive: One year, Sheriff Lee Baca — then 59 — pushed himself so hard on a 6.4-mile leg of the race that he had to be hospitalized for dehydration. Some of the lore is a little seedier: In the early 2010s, three of the department’s top brass got demoted over a cheating scandal when the Transit Services Bureau team swapped out one team member for a ringer.
Kennedy has long suspected the race may also be one of the largest annual gatherings of deputies linked to the department’s notorious tattooed subgroups.
The first time Kennedy heard of the department’s so-called deputy gangs was in the 1990s, when he was working as a federal public defender. But it wasn’t until after he accepted an appointment to the county’s Civilian Oversight Commission in 2016 that he began digging into the subgroups in earnest. Though some sheriffs have denied their existence, Luna has acknowledged and vowed to eradicate them.
But by the time the famed relay took off through the desert this spring, it was the Kirk case that was solidly in the spotlight.
***
In September, the Santa Clarita father of two was indicted by a federal grand jury for depriving Houseton of her rights by using excessive force.
“I still believe the use of force [was] reasonable,” Yu, Kirk’s lawyer, said at the time. “I look forward to defending him in this criminal case.”
The case started gaining steam on social media. A Kirk supporter launched a GoFundMe in mid-September; it has raised more than $49,000. The Resiliency Project — a nonprofit focused on supporting first responders’ mental health — took up the cause, regularly decrying the prosecution in social media posts, often amplified by Villanueva.
Over a year after a violent incident outside a Lancaster WinCo was caught on video, Deputy Trevor Kirk has been indicted by a federal grand jury.
On Jan. 27, Nick Wilson, the group’s founder, wrote to President Trump, urging him to intervene before trial. Wilson said left-wing activists wanted to make an example of Kirk, and he accused Luna of betraying his own deputy by sending his underlings to the FBI with a request that the agency investigate Kirk.
“This case is about more than just one deputy, it’s about the survival of law and order in America,” Wilson wrote, according to screenshots of the letter Villanueva posted on Instagram. “If the radical left can destroy the career of a peace officer for simply doing his job, no officer is safe.”
The trial started on Feb. 4 and lasted just three days, but it attracted a coterie of spectators. Wilson and Villanueva both attended, later posting a joint social media video of themselves consoling the distraught deputy after he was found guilty.
Even after the jury’s verdict, Kirk’s supporters continued to fault Luna, and the controversy took a political turn as a growing number of conservative accounts chimed in.
“Why would @LACoSheriff throw his own deputy under the bus when he followed department policy?” Villanueva wrote on X. “Answer: a failure of leadership.” (Villanueva did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
Soon, calls for a Baker to Vegas boycott “on behalf of Deputy Trevor Kirk” began circulating online. In mid-February, the race organizers acknowledged in a Facebook post that two teams had dropped out “as a form of protest against their department’s upper management” but emphasized that the event was supposed to be about camaraderie.
As discord spread through the department, Luna weighed in.
“No one in our Department referred this case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” he wrote Feb. 17 in a departmentwide email. “Our understanding is there was a complaint filed from an outside entity which prompted the FBI to investigate.”
The Resiliency Project responded on social media, alleging Luna “lied” in his email and in fact one of his captains had been ordered to turn the case over to the FBI.
On Feb. 18, Kirk’s supporters planned a rally in front of the Hall of Justice, demanding Luna’s resignation. Fewer than a dozen people attended. But afterward, the social media posts continued.
In early March, sheriff’s officials again sent out an agencywide email, this time imploring deputies to stop bullying each other over the race and noting that the department is “legally required” to investigate claims of misconduct.
“The Department has received several reports from personnel who have stated they have been targeted with actions of harassment, threats of retaliation, and bullying related to an upcoming running competition that is meant to foster comradery, health, and sportsmanship,” the message said, according to a copy obtained by The Times. “These accusations are both outrageous and deeply saddening, as such behavior runs counter to the values we stand for as a premier law enforcement agency.”
Alex Villanueva, the county’s new top cop, has been quietly fighting for a political win for decades
Alex Villanueva has long known the feeling of not fitting in.
By early April, the Los Angeles Sheriffs’ Professional Assn. — an organization co-founded by Villanueva in the late 1990s when it splintered off from the existing union — issued a news release with a lengthy list of teams that had joined the boycott. The organization instead touted the 5K for Kirk, an alternative race intended to raise funds for the deputy and his family.
On April 4, the day before the Vegas race, Kirk’s supporters gathered outside LASPA’s Monterey Park office for a news conference. Villanueva and Wilson — a LASPA spokesman — milled around in the crowd of burly deputies. Just after 10 a.m., the association’s president, Cesar Romero, stepped up to the mic.
“Tomorrow is the start of the Baker to Vegas challenge, a tradition that’s united law enforcement for decades,” he said. “But this year there’s over 20 sheriff stations, including our own training bureau, that are boycotting this event.
“The Baker to Vegas boycott is significant,” he said, “because it is our way of saying enough is enough.”
***
The race was already underway by the time Kennedy pulled into the makeshift parking lot near Baker a little after noon on April 5. The starting gun for the first heat had gone off more than four hours earlier, and new heats were heading out every hour on the hour.
Noticeably out of place with his full head of gray hair, rectangular glasses and professorial demeanor, Kennedy wandered among the crowd of cops and deputies, eyes peeled for suspicious ink.
All but five of the Sheriff’s Department teams had dropped out. But the women’s elite team — which was running in honor of a member who had died by suicide two years ago — was still slated to start at 1 p.m. With the sun high in the sky, runners clustered near the start line, bouncing, stretching and jogging in place.
At the appointed hour, Luna fired the starting gun. After watching the throng of runners disappear into the desert, he retreated to the shade of a nearby registration tent for interviews.
Even before the altercation in the WinCo parking lot garnered national attention, Luna told The Times, he’d already been paying close attention to the Antelope Valley.
In 2015, the county had entered into a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice amid allegations that deputies at the Lancaster and Palmdale stations had routinely harassed minority residents. The court-ordered agreement included promises to address specific problems and to submit to oversight by an independent monitor.
Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a settlement with federal officials over allegations that sheriff’s officials systematically harassed minority residents in the Antelope Valley and targeted African Americans living in subsidized housing.
But in the spring of 2023, Luna said, Justice Department attorneys told Sheriff’s Department officials they weren’t making enough progress. They threatened to take the department back to court and even “used the word ‘receivership,’” Luna said.
After he saw video of the WinCo incident gaining steam online, his department notified the court-appointed monitors. Sheriff’s officials also told the Office of Inspector General, the Board of Supervisors and the Civilian Oversight Commission, Luna said — but not the FBI or the U.S. Department of Justice.
Eventually, he said, the FBI ordered the Sheriff’s Department to stop investigating the case and turn it over to federal authorities.
“Go look at the court transcripts,” Luna told The Times. “That’ll tell you how they got the case.”
The transcripts show that, on the first day of Kirk’s trial in early February, Assistant U.S. Atty. Eli Alcaraz asked FBI Special Agent Victoria Brown how her team had learned of the video.
“It went viral in the media,” she said.
Alcaraz followed up: “Is that sometimes how your group gets cases?”
“Yes,” Brown said.
The FBI and Justice Department both declined The Times’ request for comment.
***
Just before 2 p.m., Kennedy headed back to the car. He hadn’t seen any deputy gang ink or incriminating logos — but the trip wasn’t a total waste.
Despite the tension around the Kirk case and the boycott, Kennedy found the event was still more unifying and celebratory than he’d expected.
“But,” he said, “I don’t know if that’s because so many of the stations aren’t here.”
He hoped to find that out the next day, at the race in Castaic.
But when he pulled into the Castaic Lake Recreation Area parking lot a little before 9:30 a.m. the next day, not a single person had shown up for the race. Picnic tables beside a dusty trail were empty, and the race appeared to have been canceled.
There were no updates posted online, and LASPA officials said they didn’t know what happened, as the event had been organized by an outside entity. Organizers did not respond to a request for comment.
***
More than a month later, the Kirk saga isn’t over. The lawsuit Houseton and Barnes filed has reached a settlement, but the agreement is awaiting approval from the county’s claims board and the Board of Supervisors.
And despite the initial guilty verdict, the outcome of the criminal case is now up in the air. After Trump tapped Bill Essayli as U.S. attorney for the Los Angeles area in April, he agreed to review the case before sentencing.
The attorney general has selected Riverside County Assemblymember Bill Essayli — a rising and controversial Republican voice — to serve as interim U.S. attorney for L.A. and surrounding areas.
On May 1, the Justice Department and defense team filed an unorthodox post-conviction plea deal. If the court approves the proposed agreement, Kirk would plead guilty to a misdemeanor in place of the felony a jury voted to convict him of three months ago. And whereas he could have faced up to 10 years in prison, under the new agreement federal prosecutors are recommending one year of probation.
His attorney, Yu, did not respond to a request for comment, but Wilson framed it as an encouraging development.
“While this case should never have been prosecuted in the first place, we are deeply grateful the Department of Justice took a second, impartial look at the facts and merits,” he told The Times in an email.
To attorney Caree Harper, who is handling the couple’s lawsuit, the new agreement — which describes Houseton as “swatting” the deputy’s arm — appears to be “changing the facts” and is not supported by video evidence.
If it is approved, she said, she expects activist groups will push for state or county prosecutors to take up the case.
As of now, Kirk is slated for sentencing on May 19.
Blakinger is a former Times staff writer.
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