The family of a man who was found dead outside a Lancaster supermarket in 2018 sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department last week, alleging that deputies knew 35-year-old Raymundo Rivera had become trapped in a pillar and left him there to die.
For six years, the complaint said, Rivera’s family thought his death was an accident — at least based on how the Sheriff’s Department had described it in official reports.
Then in May they started to suspect otherwise, when the ex-girlfriend of a former deputy named Aaron Tanner filed an unrelated lawsuit alleging the erstwhile lawman had physically abused her for more than two years, bragging that he was in a deputy gang whose members would “take care of her” if she told anyone…