Deputy Juan Escalante was killed Saturday morning in front of his family's home in Cypress Park.

A Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy gunned down Saturday outside his boyhood home in Cypress Park had been assigned to guard the most dangerous inmates in the county, including members of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, authorities said Sunday.
Los Angeles police and sheriff's officials said the prospect that Deputy Juan Abel Escalante was killed because of his work at the jail remained one of three possible motives. Investigators were also considering the possibility that neighborhood gang violence or a personal grudge were behind the killing.Deputy Juan Escalante, 27, was killed Saturday morning in front of his family's home in Cypress Park.He had been a sheriff's deputy for two-and-a-half years and guarded dangerous prisoners, including members of the Mexican Mafia, at the county's Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. Authorities are investigating whether his job may have led to his death. The funeral was held at the downtown Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, where Sheriff Lee Baca, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and police Chief William Bratton were among the mourners.
Part of Temple Street in front of the cathedral was shut down. At the top of the street, two fire trucks were parked facing one another with their ladders extended and crossed to drape a large American flag between them.
At 9 a.m. Escalate's flag-draped coffin was carried into the cathedral by white-gloved officers, as hundreds of uniformed law enforcement officials watched.
Officers hugged and exchanged words of condolence as they filed inside. Media were asked to remain outside. They were also barred from attending his burial at Resurrection Cemetery in Montebello.Escalante, his wife and their three children were living with his parents at his childhood home in a gang-infested neighborhood in Cypress Park, but were about to buy a home in Pomona when he was killed.
Detectives have been investigating whether Escalante was killed because of his job at the jail, where members of the Mexican Mafia gang have been known to direct street crime from behind bars.
Investigators also have been looking into whether neighborhood gang violence or a personal grudge provoked the killing.
Bratton said LAPD officers this year conducted "major operations against the Avenues Gang and the Cypress Park Gang" in the neighborhood, a densely populated section of bungalows and apartment complexes just north of the Los Angeles River near the Pasadena (110) Freeway.The Los Angeles City Council is offering a $75,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Escalante's killer, while the county Board of Supervisors approved a $20,000 reward in the case. Earlier, Villaraigosa called Escalante's murder "senseless.""Let me just say, on behalf of all of the residents of the city of Los Angeles, how mortified we are, how horrified we are at this homicide. A good man, a man who put his life on the line. A family man, a young man who grew up in a neighborhood very close to where I've lived for a long time," Villaraigosa said.Escalante's law enforcement peers praised him for his strength and resolve."He was immediately liked -- you immediately felt confident [and] safe around him," sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said of Escalante.
Sheriff Lee Baca described Escalante as a man of diligence, citing how he worked 40 hours a week at a market as a high school student, and his subsequent military service."That's not easy to do, to be a scholar, and then go into the United States Army and serve in Iraq as a medical assistant," Baca said.His peers said they would make sure Escalante's family was well provided for.
Baca said, "The Sheriff's Department will rally around the family and make sure the kids go off to college, and their futures are bright like their fathers."
"We embrace them because it is their loss, it is our loss, yet another reminder of the work and danger they face everyday," Whitmore said.
Across the street from the funeral, a small crowd who did not know Escalante, but showed up to pay tribute to him, gathered.Melody Sawyers, county employee, said of the incident, "I just, words can't express how sad it is for someone to do something like that.""It's hard for the family to find peace and move on until they know who did it is caught and servicing justice," county employee Amy Luftigviste said.