LOS ANGELES — A former Los Angeles Police Department officer who was charged with committing lewd acts on four young boys at his Covina home has died while in custody, officials said Monday.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials said only that Paul Razo, 46, died of medical complications, but no further information was released.

Razo was arrested May 10, five days after he was charged by prosecutors with eight counts of lewd acts on a child. He was scheduled to appear in court for arraignment on multiple days last week, and again on Monday, but the hearing was repeatedly delayed for unspecified reasons.

He was being held in lieu of $2.5 million bail at the sheriff’s Inmate Reception Center in downtown Los Angeles, according to inmate records.

According to the District Attorney’s Office, Razo allegedly committed the lewd acts at his home, which sheriff’s officials said was in the 4800 block of Brightview Drive in the Covina area. Prosecutors said he knew the victims through personal relationships.

The children ranged in age from roughly 9 to 13 years old when the alleged abuse began, prosecutors said. The alleged crimes occurred between 2006 and 2017, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

SEE: Ex-LAPD officer arrested, charged with committing lewd acts on children

Following his arrest, the LAPD released a statement saying it department “is aware of the criminal case involving former Police Officer Paul Razo. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division initiated an administrative investigation, which is being conducted simultaneously with the pending criminal case. The administrative investigation will include reviewing his past work history for similar behavior.

“Chief Michel Moore is deeply disturbed by these allegations as they are in direct opposition to the Department’s Core Values and expectations of a Los Angeles Police Officer. Officer Razo has been employed by the Los Angeles Police Department for approximately 24 years and was last assigned to Hollywood Area as a training coordinator. He separated from the Department in March 2023,” the LAPD statement said.

In 2018, Razo received an LAPD Medal of Valor for pulling a man out of a burning car that he saw crash in July 2016 in Glendora while off-duty.

 Ex-LAPD officer arrested, charged with committing lewd acts on children – Daily News 

 Former LAPD officer accused of molesting boys at his Covina home dies in custody – Whittier Daily News 

 The Justice Department is launching an investigation into civil rights violations in Georgia prisons, focusing on prisoner-on-prisoner violence and the targeting of LGBT inmates by prisoners and staff, federal officials said Tuesday.

The announcement comes after advocacy groups said deplorable conditions of confinement and escalating violence — including homicides and suicides — have only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic. It is part of civil rights initiatives by the Justice Department under the Biden administration to reform the nation’s law enforcement agencies and prisons.

The Justice Department found “significant justification” to open the investigation, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a video news conference Tuesday, citing public reports of dozens of homicides, stabbings and beatings, scores of smuggled weapons, and open gang activity inside state-run prisons, along with extreme staff shortages.

The Justice Department will look into reports of conditions inside state facilities, where 26 people died last year in confirmed or suspected homicides. So far this year, there have been 18 homicides, said Clarke, who will be the lead examiner.

If federal investigators find evidence of systematic violations, they will issue a written report outlining the minimal remedial measures, which the Department of Corrections would be required to implement. Clarke added that the department would work with the state to find and establish solutions.

Georgia officials on Tuesday denied they had systematically violated the rights of inmates or failed to protect them.

“The Georgia Department of Corrections is committed to the safety of all of the offenders in its custody,” Lori Benoit, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR), a nonprofit law firm that specializes in prison litigation, welcomed the Justice Department investigation as a “significant step forward in the fight for accountability for the lives that have been lost and for the people who continue to suffer in Georgia’s prisons,” according to Hannah Riley, the SCHR’s communications director, in a statement to The Washington Post.

Last year the organization requested that the Trump administration intervene and investigate the “deplorable” conditions at the state’s prisons, which it argued had worsened “to a point of constitutional crisis” during the pandemic.

In a letter sent to the Justice Department last September, the SCHR outlined a number of incidents, including riots and escalating violence in several facilities, and pointed to homicide and suicide rates reaching unprecedented levels. The group asked the federal government to step in and launch an investigation “as soon as possible.”

“We are not aware of any other group or agency that is likely to intervene,” the letter said, adding that its repeated attempts to alert senior correctional administrators of the serious violations had received “no substantive response.”

By June of last year, 19 people had died by suicide in Georgia prisons — a suicide rate twice the national average in state prisons, according to the SCHR, which investigates and monitors conditions in state jails and prisons.

In August 2020, hundreds of prisoners came out of their cells at Ware State Prison in Waycross, Ga., and ran through the compound, setting a golf cart on fire and breaking several windows. The riot left three inmates and two prison guards injured, the Georgia Department of Corrections said. Two other large-scale riots took place in two different facilities over three months.

In its letter to the Justice Department, the SCHR argued that before the riots, men had been left locked in their cells for weeks or months at a time without sufficient food, water, showers or medical care.

The SCHR also pointed to videos reportedly taken by inmates that showed injured prisoners covered in blood, prison dorms with no security supervision, and groups of men armed with machetes roaming lockdown dorms, the letter said.

On Friday, the SCHR filed a class-action suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, challenging solitary confinement conditions at Georgia State Prison, the main maximum-security facility in the state, where it said people are held for months or years and rats and roaches crawl on people while they sleep and in their food.

People subjected to solitary confinement at Georgia State Prison prisoners frequently experience psychiatric crises and become suicidal, the SCHR said in a news release. A third of all suicides reported last year in state prisons over a period of 18 months happened in this prison, according to the SCHR.

Clarke acknowledged that understaffing at correctional facilities is a “particularly acute problem.”

“Without adequate staff supervision and mental health care, there is an increased likelihood that people experiencing mental health issues may harm themselves or even commit suicide,” she said.

Riley, at the SCHR, said multiple facilities in the state operate with 70 percent officer vacancy rates, which she says can result in preventable deaths.

Clarke, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, underlined the department’s “commitment” to conducting civil rights investigations in prisons across the country.

Last year, the Justice Department sued the state of Alabama over the prevalence of violence among prisoners and the use of excessive force among staff.

Clarke pointed to the department’s inquiry into systematic abuse against female inmates at a New Jersey prison, where investigators found women were regularly sexually assaulted by guards and detailed widespread sexual abuse at the facility.

Last month, the Justice Department and New Jersey reached an agreement that required the state to implement new safeguards like training and greater supervision at the prison.

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