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By BRIAN MELLEY | The Associated Press

WEST HOLLYWOOD — When a dead man was carried out of Ed Buck’s
apartment two years ago, members of the gay political club he
lavished with thousands of dollars in political donations
swiftly ousted him.

Buck attempted a comeback in early January, less than six months
after prosecutors declined to bring charges in the overdose
death. He tried to crash the Stonewall Democratic Club’s holiday
party at a West Hollywood wine bar, telling members he had been
exonerated, club president Lester Aponte said.

“When somebody dies at your house, wouldn’t you think that’s the
kind of event that will make you re-examine your life choices?”
Aponte told The Associated Press. “It doesn’t seem like it
registered with him at all.”

Two days after Buck was escorted out of the bash, another gay
man was found dead in his West Hollywood apartment — again from
a methamphetamine overdose. Buck is white, and both dead men
were black.

He wasn’t stopped until authorities said a third black man
nearly died. It’s what victims’ families and their supporters
warned about for two years as they tried to get prosecutors to
bring charges.

“I said it the last time we were down here that there’s going to
be a third victim,” said LaTisha Nixon, whose 26-year-old son,
Gemmel Moore, was the first to die. “We said there’s gonna be a
second victim. We kept saying it because we all knew … Ed Buck
didn’t stop doing what he was doing.”

Nixon and her supporters welcomed the arrest but criticized the
time it took to put Buck behind bars and renewed their questions
about whether a wealthy white Democratic donor benefited because
the victims were mostly gay black men and drug users, some of
whom were sex workers and homeless.

“If white gay men had been dying in a black man’s house or
anybody’s house, rather, this case would have been taken a lot
more seriously,” said Jasmyne Cannick, a communications
strategist who spearheaded the effort to get justice for Moore.
“Ed Buck knew who he was preying on, and he knew that people
would not care. Or he thought that people would not care.”

Buck, 65, was arrested Sept. 17 after the third man was
hospitalized for an overdose.

The Los Angeles County district attorney charged Buck with
running a drug house. Two days later, U.S. prosecutors charged
him with distributing methamphetamine resulting in Moore’s death.

Buck is being held without bail and has yet to enter a plea in
either case. His attorneys declined to comment, but one defense
lawyer, Seymour Amster, previously said Buck denied any role in
the deaths of Moore or Timothy Dean, 55, who overdosed Jan. 7.

Moore was found naked on a mattress on Buck’s living room floor
on July 27, 2017. Two dozen syringes and five glass pipes were
found, along with meth stored in a toolbox with sex toys.

Prosecutors said Buck paid men with drugs and money to feed a
sexual fetish that included having them pose in underwear and
injecting some of them with large doses of drugs.

District Attorney Jackie Lacey has defended her decision not to
bring charges sooner or file homicide charges. She said there
was insufficient evidence to charge Buck in the deaths and that
it made more sense to proceed with a federal prosecution that
would bring a minimum 20-year sentence if he’s convicted.

Lacey, who is black, denied that Buck, who had given her a $100
donation that she later returned, received any favoritism. She
said investigators didn’t have the necessary witnesses to make
an arrest until the latest victim provided the account that gave
them their big break.

“We did not have other victims that were willing to talk to the
prosecutors to tell us what happened, to tell us they were
injected by Mr. Buck,” Lacey said.

The federal criminal complaint, however, said eight men had
provided harrowing accounts about encounters with Buck before
the latest victim survived overdosing twice in a week this
month. He said he lived with Buck for weeks this summer and Buck
regularly injected him with meth.

Several of those men said Buck encouraged them to take drugs or
injected them himself — some against their will and others who
said they woke up to being injected or suspected they had been
given a powerful drug before passing out.

One man, who was homeless and worked as a prostitute, told
investigators in March that Buck was known as Dr. Kevorkian, a
reference to the late doctor imprisoned for helping terminally
ill patients end their lives. The man said Buck injected him
twice with meth in 2011 and he lost consciousness each time.

“Buck insists on injecting prostitutes with methamphetamine and
… would dismiss anyone who would not permit it without
compensation,” according to an affidavit by Drug Enforcement
Administration agent John Mundell.

Lacey, the district attorney, said witnesses were reluctant or
had “lawyered up” and wouldn’t speak, while others didn’t have
firsthand encounters with Buck.

Cannick, the communications strategist, and two lawyers
representing Moore’s mother in a lawsuit against Buck, the DA
and Sheriff’s Department, disputed the prosecutor’s assertions.
They said they accompanied victims mentioned in the criminal
complaint to interviews with sheriff’s deputies and provided
text messages, photos, videos and receipts of electronic
payments Buck made.

The witnesses all spoke with Los Angeles County sheriff’s
investigators, who consulted frequently with county prosecutors,
said Lt. Derrick Alfred, who oversaw the team of detectives who
investigated Dean’s death. He said the activists were integral
by finding witnesses.

Moore’s death was originally listed as an accidental overdose. A
criminal investigation wasn’t launched for about three weeks,
after Cannick said she published excerpts from a journal Moore
kept that said he had become addicted to drugs and “Ed Buck is
the one to thank.”

Prosecutors declined to bring charges a year after Moore’s
death, but another investigation began after Dean died. In July,
deputies approached a federal-state task force on opioid
overdoses, which agreed to take the case, DEA spokesman Kyle
Mori said.

Attorney Ambrosio Rodriguez, a former Riverside County
prosecutor, said it was unusual for federal prosecutors to take
over a state investigation. He said he didn’t buy Lacey’s
statements about the evidence and said her explanation for
passing the case to federal prosecutors was “disingenuous.”
“No one is pickier about what cases they file than the federal
government,” Rodriguez said. “It’s a known thing in criminal law
that the federal government only files perfect cases. … They
want two helpings of all the evidence in the world.”

Before Buck could be charged in federal court, investigators
learned of the latest overdose and finally made an arrest.

When Buck was taken into custody, “he acted confused, seemingly
wondering why we were there and what was going on,” Alfred said.

A small crowd, including Cannick, gathered across the street
from the building where protesters had once posted signs saying,
“Justice 4 Gemmel” and “Ed Buck is a Predator!”

Within a week, an eviction notice was posted on Buck’s door. It
cited the illegal drugs and the deaths of two men found inside.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/30/activists-wonder-why- political-donor-wasnt-arrested-sooner/

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