Trabuco Hills High School in Mission Viejo, California (Screengrab via KTLA).
Just days after he was hit with a civil lawsuit for showing a group of teens obscene videos, an Orange County, California, sheriff’s deputy has officially been stripped of his license to work as a law enforcement officer.
Justin Raymond Ramirez, 34, faced criminal charges in February 2023 for showing four teenage girls videos that were pornographic, violent, and otherwise inappropriate — all while working as a school resource officer at Trabuco Hills High School in Mission Viejo. According to prosecutors, during a school lunch break in September 2022, two girls approached Ramirez’s patrol car and the officer showed them a video of a couple engaging in sexual intercourse. The girls then called two additional girls over to the car and Ramirez showed the video to all four students. The students were all 15 or 16 years old.
Prosecutors went on to describe the disturbing video:
After a few moments, another man enters the room with a knife. He stabs the first man and proceeds to repeatedly stab the woman on the bed. The woman ultimately goes lifeless as a pool of blood appears on camera. In addition to showing this video to the students, Ramirez sent the video by phone to another deputy sheriff in 2021.
Prosecutors said that a second video Ramirez shared with the group of teens showed two men smoking a controlled substance together and one man blowing smoke from the substance “into the rear end area of the other man.”
The two videos, along with a third that showed a severe dog bite sustained by a woman, were found on Ramirez’s cellphone by police and matched descriptions provided by the students. Additional searches of Ramirez’s cellphone showed other images that appeared to be inappropriately taken from crime scenes, nude photos of Ramirez on police grounds, and a video of a couple having intercourse that appeared to be recorded through the window of a private home.
When one student’s parent notified the school about the incident, authorities referred the case to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office for prosecution.
At the time, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement, “Ramirez had no business being in a position of trust around children — and he abused that position of trust in a truly disgusting way.” Spitzer also noted at the time that Ramirez resigned from the Sheriff’s Department in December 2022.
In April 2023, Ramirez entered a court-ordered diversion program that permitted him to avoid jail time for the misdemeanor criminal charges against him related to the videos.
After holding a hearing in March, the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) revoked Ramirez’s license to work as a law enforcement officer in the state on Thursday. The commission’s decertification decision will be forwarded to a national database of ineligible officers.
The commission’s decision came days after a civil lawsuit was filed against Ramirez and Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes by a family of one of the teen girls who said Ramirez showed her the videos.
According to the Orange County Register, the lawsuit filed by the family alleged that the teen had been reluctant to tell her parents about seeing the video and felt “extreme emotional distress” at losing trust in police. The girl’s mother said in the lawsuit that when she called authorities about the matter, she “emphatically” told a dispatcher multiple times that she did not want anyone sent to her home, because she did not want police involved to know where she lived.
According to the Orange County Register, the mother claimed that despite assurances that a different law enforcement agency would respond to the mother’s complaint, Ramirez and another deputy showed up at the family’s residence. According to the complaint, Ramirez “had a strange grin on his face” while the mother explained her concerns — all while the mother was unaware that Ramirez himself was the officer in question.
The lawsuit also reportedly alleged that later, the mother received an apologetic call from Barnes, who said he was “just as angry as she was.”
Ramirez was also a defendant in a federal wrongful death lawsuit stemming from the 2019 death of Chong Tok “Richard” Rha following a violent struggle as the officers tried to take Rha into custody. Though Ramirez was cleared of any criminal charges related to Rha’s arrest, the Orange County Board of Supervisors agreed to a $1.5 million settlement of the civil claim filed by Rha’s family.
Counsel for Ramirez could not immediately be reached for comment.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
