L.A. County settles lawsuit from teen allegedly beaten at Malibu juvenile facility

Los Angeles County plans to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by a teenager alleging county probation officers pinned him down, painfully contorted his body and nearly suffocated him at a county juvenile detention facility in Malibu in 2020, according to court documents.

Both sides filed a joint notice of settlement in January. A federal judge tentatively dismissed the matter ahead of the trial, but left open the possibility of returning to the case if the proposed settlement isn’t finalized within six months, court records showed.

Jesus Ruiz, a spokesperson for L.A. County’s CEO, confirmed the settlement has yet to receive approval from the county’s Claims Board or the Board of Supervisors. He did not respond to a request for the terms of the agreement.

“The settlement is expected to be scheduled for the Claims Board in the near future,” he said in an email.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Lewis Khashan, could not be reached for comment.

The incident occurred in 2020 at Campus Kilpatrick, a juvenile detention facility that until last year housed a small number of boys in a camp-like environment in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Beckham Cardona, 17 at the time, alleged in the lawsuit filed in 2023 that he was extremely hungry and had “had asked camp personnel for more food and yet was chastised and beaten for such a request” by probation officers, including Supervising Deputy Probation Officer Oscar Cross, who was later criminally charged by the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office.

“Despite his unimposing physical attributes and repeated pleas for his mother and painful screams to remove the excessive weight from Cardona’s throat and/or chest, the officers continued to asphyxiate, assault, and bend Cardona in half, causing Cardona to experience immense pain and near-death due to the lack of oxygen to his lungs and brain,” the lawsuit states.

Cross pleaded no contest to a charge of assault by a peace officer last year and is expected to be sentenced later this month, according to court records.

The Los Angeles Times first published surveillance footage from the incident in February 2023. The video shows Cardona cornered next to a bed by three officers. When one reaches toward him, Cardona grabs the man’s arm and is then shoved away. Another officer arrives and grabs Cardona by the back of the neck and slams him onto the bed as others pile on.

One officer then grabs Cardona’s leg and bends it toward the teen’s head as someone repeats “stop resisting.” Cardona can be heard screaming in pain before he is dragged from the bed and out of the room.

The department’s leadership, under then-Probation Chief Adolfo Gonzales, did not terminate Cross and initially refused to share the footage with oversight agencies and the district attorney’s office, the lawsuit stated.

Cardona did not report the incident because an unnamed probation officer threatened to sabotage Cardona’s release if he did not stay silent, according to an amended complaint.

L.A. County broadly denied the allegations in court filings.

If approved, the settlement will be the latest in a series of payouts over misconduct within L.A. County’s juvenile detention facilities.

Last year, the county agreed to pay $2.7 million to a teenager whose assault at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall led to a discovery of a series of “gladiator-style” fights and the indictment of 30 probation officers.

Separately, the county approved unprecedented settlements of $4 billion and later $828 million to resolve thousands of sexual abuse cases, many of which occurred within Probation Department facilities, over the course of decades.

Today, Campus Kilpatrick is no longer used to house boys. Probation repurposed the facility, once considered the blueprint for its “Care First, Jails Last” push, as an all-girls juvenile facility in late 2025.

The shift reduced the population at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in an effort to avoid that facility’s closure due to poor conditions driven by a staffing shortage.

Kilpatrick recently failed a state inspection and could face closure too if the deficiencies are not remedied in time.