Sheriff faces lawsuit over burn photos

TAMPA - Lorenzo Rubio says the final straw in a bitter divorce drove him to don body armor and head for his girlfriend's office in search of a gun.

"I wanted to take my own life with my own hands," he says. "I didn't want anybody else to do that."

In the lawsuit Rubio admits violently resisting deputies. He says he was tasered, handcuffed, and put in a sweltering cruiser. He says he complained and kicked, then deputies then hog tied him, and put him face down, and barechested on hot asphalt, suffering what doctors at Tampa General said were second degree burns.

"When I say burning, I'm saying to the point where my skin was literally sizzling, my skin was sizzling, I could hear my skin sizzling on the pavement," he said.

Rubio says the more he complained, the more he was burned.

"They further pushed his body into the pavement as a sick form of torture," says Rubio's attorney Michael Maddox.

Rubio plead guilty to resisting and battering the deputies, but instead of prison, he's doing five years of probation and will end up without a criminal record.

Now he wants the Sheriff to pay.

We took all of it, the lawsuit, photos, police reports, to an expert in the use of force, a veteran police officer who says he thinks every action of the deputies was justified.

"You don't put on a bullet proof vest to commit suicide," says retired TPD Sgt. Jim Diamond. "You put on a vest to harm someone else or commit suicide by cop."

Now a police union administrator, Diamond is an expert on use of force, and he says Rubio's vest and continuing resistance gave deputies no choice but to push back, especially when Rubio started kicking cruiser windows.

Yet considering the pictures of Rubio's injuries, Diamond says a jury could easily see it as deputies going over the line.

"You don't want to go in front of a jury with those kind of pictures and say look what they did," he said.

The Sheriff's Office says nowhere in the reports that day, or after, does Rubio complain about anything.

"Quite frankly, they would have been justified in using deadly force," said Chief Deputy Joe Docobo.

Attorney Maddox's reaction?

"We'll let a jury decide."