Deputy Bruce Lee, 45, a 22-year veteran, was responding to a domestic violence call in La Quinta
when he was attacked by Kevin Diabo, 24, outside a house.
“Bruce didn’t do anything wrong,” Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle said Wednesday. “We give
our deputies a lot of discretion in these situations. They have to make decisions based on their
assessment of the situation, and he didn’t do anything outside of procedure. The investigation
indicates that [Lee] made contact with [Diabo] and the guy went off on him. That’s happened to
all of us at least once in our career. Unfortunately in this case, it was a fatal.”
After he was attacked, the deputy and Diabo apparently were locked in a hand-to-hand struggle,
and the suspect was able to hit the deputy with a strong-enough blow to knock him out, Doyle said.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-may-15-me-copfatal15-story.html
