Ross Won’t Contest Firing From Sheriff’s Department

A fired Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigator once accused of murdering three prostitutes has dropped his efforts to be reinstated to the Sheriff’s Department, the county Civil Service Commission disclosed Monday.

Former narcotics detective Rickey Ross spent nearly three months in County Jail after his arrest last February, then was released when prosecutors discovered that ballistics tests performed on the deputy’s handgun had erroneously linked him to the slayings.

Ross, nonetheless, was fired by the Sheriff’s Department because he allegedly was found smoking crack cocaine with a prostitute in South-Central Los Angeles at the time of his arrest.

Ross’s decision not to appeal his dismissal was contained in a one-sentence letter to the commission, dated last Friday. It came just before he was to go before a county hearing officer today in what was expected to be a dramatic appeal.

On Monday, the commission received by messenger a letter from the 18-year Sheriff’s Department veteran, declaring: “I hereby withdraw my appeal from before the Civil Service Commission and request that you either seal my file or return all materials in it to me.”

Last week, Undersheriff Robert A. Edmonds said, Ross resigned

from the department “for personal reasons.” The resignation--effective April 27--was the same day that Sheriff Sherman Block had sent Ross a formal termination letter.

Ross, 40, declined to comment when reached at his Rialto home.

His attorney, Howard L. Weitzman, said an agreement had been reached with the Sheriff’s Department under which Ross was allowed to resign.

Weitzman said that Ross was emotionally drained by his incarceration for 81 days in County Jail and the attendant publicity. The attorney said Ross decided he could not resume his old job, even if he won reinstatement.

Can’t Go Back

“He’s emotionally incapable of going back to law enforcement work,” Weitzman said in a telephone interview. The lawyer said that Ross, given “the trauma he’s gone through and the anguish he’s suffered,” did not think he could remain a sheriff’s deputy.

But Weitzman said he is preparing a lawsuit designed “to allow Rickey to recover damages of unlawful arrest.”

Ross’ problems began in the early morning hours of Feb. 23, when two Los Angeles police officers found him sitting in an unmarked county car on Flower Street, between 57th and 58th streets, with a prostitute, Jimmie Joann McGhee, 21, of Denver.

Block, in his termination letter to Ross, said the deputy had “brought discredit and embarrassment to yourself and the Department” when he was allegedly found smoking crack cocaine with the prostitute.

“She said that you provided a small piece of cocaine and at the time the officers approached your vehicle, you and she were smoking cocaine together,” Block wrote.

Ross’s arrest had been announced at a news conference conducted by Block and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates after the Police Department’s forensics tests purportedly linked Ross’s handgun to the three slayings.

But then, in a remarkable turnabout, a prosecutor announced last May 15 that the murder charges would have to be dismissed because the ballistics tests did not link Ross’s gun to the slayings.

McGhee, in County Jail on a prostitution charge, was scheduled to be the first witness today at Ross’ hearing.