Off-Duty Deputy Kills Man at Home of Neighbor

PORT HUENEME — Eighty-one-year-old Lillian Folk was getting ready for bed Sunday night when she heard banging on her back door.

Folk tiptoed to the kitchen and saw a young man looking in the window and banging on her back door.

“I just ran out the front door, across the street to the deputy’s house screaming,” she said Monday.

Barefoot, but still in her Sunday clothes, Folk ran to the home of off-duty Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Steven Lengyel. Lengyel’s wife kept Folk in the living room while the deputy went to investigate. Folk did not see what happened next.

“I heard the shot, yes, but I didn’t see what happened,” said Folk, who lives alone with her cat, Patches. “And I want you to get this right: I wasn’t threatened or anything. I just saw him and I ran across the street.”

Police investigators on Monday were trying to piece together what happened. But they confirmed that Senior Deputy Lengyel, an eight-year department veteran who works in the Fillmore station, fatally shot 26-year-old Jack Dale Sexton about 9 p.m. Sunday on the quiet 900 block of Evergreen Lane next to Bubbling Springs Park.

Police said Lengyel was going to investigate a possible break-in at Folk’s home when he confronted Sexton and shot him once.

Reached Monday, Sexton’s family members said he was not a burglar. They said he was unarmed, shot in the back, and that he may have gone to Folk’s home looking for a phone because he had wrecked his car in a drainage ditch that runs through the park.

At home Monday morning after a grueling night of questioning by investigators from the Port Hueneme Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office, Lillian Folk said she was not even sure if the man she saw looking in her back door was the same one killed by Senior Deputy Lengyel.

She said the man she saw at the back door had blond hair; the 6-foot-3 Sexton had dark brown hair. But police said Monday that they believe Sexton was alone.

Folk said she thinks Sexton scaled a chain-link fence that separates her backyard from the park.

Nothing was disturbed in her home, Folk said, except for four large pieces of her living room carpet that were cut out and lifted by police for evidence.

“That’s where we think he got shot,” said Folk’s pastor, the Rev. Mason French, looking at the gaping holes in the carpet.

After Sexton was shot, he reportedly staggered down a sidewalk and either collapsed or was tackled in the driveway of a home two doors away, where he died, said Lt. Fernando Estrella, a Port Hueneme police spokesman.

Police were otherwise tight-lipped about the investigation and details of the incident, refusing to say whether Sexton was armed or whether he had threatened Lengyel before being shot.

They also would not confirm whether Sexton was inside the home when he was shot.

At Sexton’s parents’ home, his father, Joey Sexton, said he and his wife were too overcome with emotion to talk about their son’s death.

But Sexton’s 28-year-old sister, Renay Casey, said her brother had just been at a Super Bowl party near the shooting scene and had accidentally driven his VW Jetta into a ditch at Bubbling Springs Park.

“He was probably trying to reach a phone because of his car,” Casey said. “My brother wouldn’t rob anybody. He was not that kind of person. If he needed money, he would have asked me or my parents.”

Her brother, a former Oxnard High School baseball player, had several speeding tickets but had never been in serious trouble with police, she said.

“He’s not that kind of guy,” she added.

After seeing her brother’s body Monday at the Ventura County coroner’s office, Casey said her brother was shot in the back.

“I just want you to know that Jack was shot in the back,” she said, holding back tears. “They said they’re going to put in 1,000 hours investigating what happened, but it doesn’t change that he was shot in the back.”

Coroner’s officials said the autopsy on Sexton had not yet been completed late Monday and would not confirm that a bullet struck Sexton in the back.

They added that toxicology tests, which will determine if Sexton was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, could take up to six weeks to be completed.

Sexton had been on disability for the last two years from a job at Ralph’s supermarket after having a blood clot removed from his shoulder, his sister said.

He lived at home and was expected to finish a two-year vocational training program in June with ITT Technical Institute, where he was learning engineering and computer skills, she said.

Deborah Wells, a vocation rehabilitation counselor who was working with Sexton, said he was exceptionally polite and good natured.

“I had just talked with his mom last week and told her that he was just the nicest young man, and that they had done a wonderful job raising him,” said Wells, who helps with job retraining for people on workers’ compensation.

Wells said Sexton had worked for Ralph’s for five years but was hospitalized in 1994 after a particularly heavy two days of lifting and restocking shelves.

“I would say that he was very personable and very polite,” she said. “He worked really hard in this program. He told me he was just an average student in high school, but he had a 3.0 [grade point average] while in the program. He was very self-motivated. . . . I just think he wanted to get back out there and get a job.”

Garnon Martin, 21, a friend and former housemate of Sexton’s, agreed. “I knew Jack and he was no thief. I don’t really understand what happened.”