LA Youth Sports Team Must Pay for Deputies in Order to Use Park

Due to a fatal stabbing among fans with no real connection to the actual teams

The East L.A. Bobcats will have to change their name and pay as much as $774 a day for added sheriff's patrols if they want to come back to Salazar Park with the blessing of Los Angeles County officials.

The Bobcats were booted from the park, where the youth football and cheer league had practiced for decades, after a fight at a pizza parlor involving adult fans escalated to a fatal stabbing. Jose De Jesus Ruiz, 23, of Bakersfield is charged with stabbing to death a Los Angeles man, Patrick Raymond Ortega, 25.

Ruiz was at the restaurant with a Bobcats team of 9-to-11-year-olds and their parents after a game in Bell Gardens. Ortega was there with another group of restaurant patrons. He had family members who were part of the Bulldogs, a newer East L.A.-based youth football team, sheriff's officials said. (The teams that make up the two leagues do not play each other.)