Ventura County Pays $440,000 to Black Bouncer Beaten by Off-Duty Deputies After He Stopped a Chokehold

Jaiden Perkins was working the door at El Rey Cantina in Camarillo on March 30, 2025, when he saw a customer with both hands on a woman’s throat. He told the man he could not put hands on her like that. The customer, off-duty Ventura County Sheriff’s deputy Dylan Davis, answered, according to Perkins, «I’ll f—king kill you,» and punched him in the cheekbone. Deputy Anthony Malagon joined the tackle. Perkins says the two of them kicked, punched, and stomped him until a patron pulled them off.

The county later wrote a check. In October 2025 Ventura County paid Perkins $440,000 to resolve his claim over the beating. He had sought $1 million after a concussion and neck injuries that, he said, cost him the security job plus shifts at a grocery store and as an Amazon driver. The criminal case did not settle with the civil one.

What the charges say, and what a judge refused

Surveillance inside the restaurant reportedly showed Davis shoving his wife before the fight moved outside. On July 16, 2025, the Ventura County District Attorney charged both men, by then former deputies, with felonies. Davis faces battery, battery causing serious injury, force likely to cause significant injury, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, and criminal threats. Malagon faces battery causing serious injury and force likely to cause significant injury. Davis also picked up a misdemeanor count tied to a female off-duty deputy who tried to restrain him.

Both men pleaded not guilty in August 2025. On March 2, 2026, a judge denied Davis’s request for mental-health diversion, the off-ramp that would have paused the prosecution for treatment. The Ventura County Star reported that the criminal file stays on the regular calendar. Perkins submitted a victim-impact statement asking the court not to treat the beating as a wellness errand. That ruling is the new angle: the county paid the bouncer, fired the deputies, and still has to try the man who wanted the case moved into a treatment docket.

A bouncer’s job description is not a use-of-force policy

Perkins, a Black father of two from Oxnard, has said he thought the deputies were going to kill him and that he lost consciousness. He was 25. KTLA’s interview recorded the injuries he listed: concussion, head, jaw, arms, back, and neck. He left the cantina job because of the trauma and then lost the grocery and Amazon shifts when his body would not keep the hours.

The men who beat him carried badges when they walked into the bar and criminal complaints when they left it. Off-duty status does not create a private fighting league. It is supposed to raise the standard. Davis was not an anonymous drunk. He was a deputy whose department later had to explain why two of its own were on the floor of a restaurant beating the employee who stopped a chokehold.

This desk has watched that standard fail in other uniforms, including the Logansport officer who used a child as a sandwich-board punishment and the Alabama 911 call that ended with a man dead after he asked for help. Different facts. Same question: what happens when the person with the gun is the person who needs to be stopped.

What $440,000 does not close

A county check can cover medical bills and lost shifts. It cannot retry the night on video. Davis and Malagon remain entitled to the presumption of innocence. The diversion denial means Davis will have to face the battery and domestic counts in open court rather than in a treatment docket.

Perkins has said, in public comments after the settlement, that the civil number was not justice. It was speed. He did not want to wait years for a trial that might still excuse the men who put him on the ground. That is the quiet part of most police-violence payouts. The government buys peace with the victim while the criminal file crawls. Readers who follow The AEGIS Alliance police accountability desk have seen that split before: money first, verdict later, if a verdict arrives at all.

Camarillo is not an anonymous freeway exit. Old Town is a restaurant strip. Patrons filmed enough of the night for local television to reconstruct the walk from the table to the sidewalk. Davis, 33, of Ventura, and Malagon, then 27, of Camarillo, were identified leaving the cantina shortly before the fight. The sheriff’s office put them on leave, then the district attorney put them in a charging document. Employment discipline and criminal charging are not the same act. One protects the department. The other is supposed to protect the public.

The domestic count is not a footnote

The easiest version of this story is two cops versus a bouncer. That version is incomplete. Perkins says he intervened because a woman was being choked. Prosecutors added a spousal-injury count against Davis. A separate misdemeanor accuses him of battering a woman who tried to stop him. If those counts are proved, the beating outside was not a bar scuffle that got out of hand. It was the second stage of a domestic assault that a Black security worker interrupted and paid for with a concussion.

Off-duty deputies do not shed the duty to not put hands on a spouse. They also do not acquire a right to destroy the person who tells them to stop. The AEGIS Alliance is leaving that sentence on the page because county settlements have a habit of sanding it off. Four hundred and forty thousand dollars can look like closure in a budget line. It is not closure on a felony calendar.

Davis and Malagon will get their day in court. Perkins already had his on the floor of a cantina because he told a deputy not to choke his wife. The cameras inside El Rey, the hospital record, and the victim-impact letter are now the state’s problem, not a claim form the county can close with a wire transfer. That is the only version of accountability that still has a date attached to it.