Disclaimer: This story includes discussion of violence and police brutality. Images depicting blood are featured within the article.
By Elise Ong, October 28, 2025
In search of her son, who was out walking around alone in the midst of a mental health crisis, Vanessa Perez approached what officers told her was a bad fight scene just a few blocks away her house in La Puente.
For 45 minutes, she was held back from the scene surrounded by sheriffs, police and firefighters, given no details about the identity of the person placed on a gurney, and wondered where the other person involved in the fight was. A voice screamed out “Mom” before falling unconscious again, and her heart dropped in disbelief at the realization that the person on the gurney was her son.
Vanessa Perez’s son Joseph Perez, who was 22 years old at the time, was punched and struck 121 times by seven sheriff’s deputies that day. According to Vanessa Perez, the police report made it sound like her son was “like the Hulk, like he was Rocky Balboa in his prime.” In reality, she said he was only 110 pounds, 5 feet, 4 inches tall and going through a mental health crisis.
Joseph Perez was arrested after the incident for attempting to resist arrest and was in county jail for two years. The deputies involved currently face no consequences, according to Vanessa Perez, and instead have been reassigned and transferred. She said her son needed 19 stitches and 17 staples around his bloodied head and face because of the beating. To this day, he still suffers from seizures, head and neck pain, nerve damage, memory loss and nightmares.
Now a criminology student at Cal Poly Pomona, Vanessa Perez helped get a bill passed Oct. 6 that allows oversight into confidential police records when investigating misconduct, intended to help those seeking increased accountability for law enforcement. She hopes to use her degree from CPP to create more legislation like this.
Vanessa Perez has been attending Los Angeles County’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission meetings for three years, sharing her son’s story in an effort to prove why bill AB847 is so important. Despite the sheriff initially denying subpoenas, using Joseph Perez’s story as hard-hitting evidence eventually got the ball rolling on the bill in March and is now law.
According to Vanessa Perez, the emotional toll of having to tell her story time and time again is ongoing and bittersweet, but she said it’s worth it to spark important and necessary change.
“I think I’ve come to the point of, I can’t continue to cry,” Vanessa Perez said. “In order for me to be heard, I need to be able to speak, and I need to be able to be Joseph’s voice. I’m in fight mode.”
Aside from officers getting away with misconduct, another concern Vanessa Perez had was how easily they could be rotated, promoted or assigned elsewhere without necessary transparency. When her son was released from county jail, she learned one of the deputy officers involved in her son’s beating was hired at her daughter’s high school.
“They’re getting away with everything,” Vanessa Perez said. “Not only with the beating, but now, how is he put into a school? … How does he pass the background (check) and get into a high school to work with 2,000 children and my daughter, the sister of the boy he beat?”
With the new law in place, the commission is looking into the case and the deputies involved who have been moved around, according to Vanessa Perez. She hopes some accountability will come soon, as she is tired of seeing how they “rotate and transfer instead of removing and terminating.”
CPP sociology professor Peter Hanink projects a risk of this new law could be leaked confidential information. However, he believes a bigger issue is often the attempts made to cover up misconduct, and that this law will help bring light to possible patterns seen in officers’ actions.
“This kind of information is often used in criminal cases and sentencing, where we would look at (if) this (is) someone’s first offense or does someone have a pattern of doing this,” Hanink said. “That’s something that we use all the time when people are convicted of crimes, so applying that same kind of logic and standard to police misconduct seems like it makes sense.”
Vanessa Perez believes a more foundational issue at play is a lack of education. According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the minimum education requirement to be a deputy sheriff trainee is a high school diploma or its equivalent.
Vanessa Perez believes by reinforcing higher education backgrounds and having captain or sergeant positions be unattainable without a degree, misconduct might lessen. She took it upon herself to go back to school and came to CPP after her son’s incident to strengthen her understanding of how she can fight back.
“There’s a lot of issues of corruption,” Vanessa Perez said. “I would go to court and the school district, and I kept fighting. I said, ‘You know what, the only way to take this is by going back to school and getting an education.’”
Assistant sociology professor Sara Wilf is impressed with the work Vanessa Perez has done, and her “strength and fortitude and persistence” while doing so.
“I think everyone can create a change, whether it’s small or large,” Wilf said. “In Vanessa’s case, she’s contributing to a really big change that’s going to benefit a lot of people … Truly, change does not happen unless people are instigating it.”
Vanessa Perez has an active Instagram account dedicated to her son’s case to continue bringing awareness to the cause and other related cases. She hopes her work will shed more light on police brutality, and plans to go to law school to help other families who are experiencing the same pain.
Feature image courtesy of Vanessa Perez
