The class-action suit is the latest to challenge the legality of cash bail systems in California after a 2021 state Supreme Court ruling found it is unconstitutional to jail defendants solely because of their inability to pay their way out from behind bars.

“Every day, Riverside County imprisons people based on nothing more than their inability to pay an arbitrary, pre-set amount of cash that Defendants demand for their release,” attorneys for the civil rights groups argue in the 80-page complaint. “These individuals are not detained because they are too dangerous to release: The government would release them right away if they could pay. They are detained simply because they are too poor to purchase their freedom.”

The suit was brought by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Civil Rights Corps, Public Justice in Oakland and several other law firms on behalf of two people incarcerated in Riverside County jails and two local faith leaders. It names as defendants the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Superior Court system and the county.

Lt. Deirdre Vickers, a sheriff’s department spokesperson, said she could not comment on pending litigation, as did a representatives for the county court system. The county executive’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

While the suit argues money bail is unconstitutional across California and seeks an injunction ending its use, attorneys said they are focusing on Riverside County following a spate of deaths in the jails in 2022. That year, Riverside County recorded 18 inmate fatalities, the highest number in a decade.

The following year, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, a Democrat, opened what remains an ongoing investigation into complaints about living conditions in the county jails and allegations that deputies use excessive force against detainees.

Inmate deaths have fallen since 2022. The county reported 13 jail fatalities in 2023 and six last year, according to Vickers.

Bianco — a law-and-order conservative who has joined a crowded field of Democrats to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom in the 2026 election — has previously dismissed the state’s investigation into his jails as politically motivated. Bianco maintains the jail deaths, many of which authorities attribute to drug overdoses and suicides, are a reflection of the inmates’ life choices rather than a sign of any problem with the jail system.

“Every single one of these inmate deaths was out of anyone’s control,” Bianco said after news of the state investigation broke. “The fact of the matter is that they just happened to be in our custody.”

The cash bail system has deep roots in the U.S. as a means of pressuring defendants to show up for scheduled court appearances. Attend trial, and the sizable cash payments are returned to you or your family; skip court, and you forfeit your deposit.

Critics argue it effectively creates a two-tiered justice system, allowing wealthy defendants to pay their way out while awaiting trial, and leaving low-income defendants stuck behind bars. Proponents of eliminating the bail system contend that decisions about whether to jail defendants ahead of trial should be based on the severity of their crimes and the risk they pose to public safety, and not hinge on their income status.

Brian Hardingham, a senior attorney with Public Justice, said people sometimes spend days in jail awaiting their first court appearance, only for a prosecutor to decline to file a case presented by local police. That stint behind bars can have an outsize effect on people’s lives, especially if they are low-income, Hardingham said.

“You meet people with 6-month-old kids in jail who, if they’re lucky, there is a partner or a parent or someone who can watch their kids,” he said, adding that even a brief stretch in a county jail can result in people losing their job, vehicle or even their residence.

Supporters of the cash bail system, including many law enforcement groups, say that doing away with it would leave too many defendants free to potentially flee and re-offend, leading to crime spikes.

The issue grew increasingly controversial during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus spread with deadly consequences through the state’s jails and prisons. Los Angeles County instituted a zero bail policy for most offenses in 2020, trying to reduce jail crowding at a time when the virus was spreading rapidly. That policy was rescinded in June 2022.

Despite concerns from police groups, a 2023 report to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors showed re-arrest and failure-to-appear rates remained relatively static among those freed pre-trial while the zero-bail policy was in place.

A similar lawsuit to the one filed against Riverside County prompted Los Angeles County court officials to revise their bail policies in 2023. Under the new system, the vast majority of defendants accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies are now cited and released, or freed under specified conditions after a judge reviews their case. Defendants accused of serious offenses, including murder, manslaughter, rape and most types of assault, still face a stiff cash bail schedule.

Fears that the new system would result in a crime spike have not been borne out. Total crime in areas patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department fell by about 2% in 2024, the first calendar year the reduced bail policy was in place, according to department data. The city of Los Angeles has seen significant decreases in the number of robberies, property crimes and aggravated assaults committed this year, as of mid-May, records show.

Given the 2021 state Supreme Court ruling and the changes in Los Angeles, Hardingham said he is hopeful other counties will shift their bail policies without having to engage in a court fight.

“We would hope that they would be willing to see the writing on the wall and make the changes that are necessary,” he said.

The post Civil rights groups sue to end cash bail in Riverside County, alleging dangerous jail conditions appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

As two cellmates were fighting in a Riverside County, Calif., jail, an inexperienced guard remotely opened the cell door, a violation of safety protocols. One of the men immediately pulled out the other, hoisted him over his shoulder and threw him over a catwalk railing. He fell 15 feet before smashing into a metal table. It was his first day in the jail and his last day of life.

At another county jail, a detainee who had been mentally ill and charged with child sexual abuse should have been segregated for his own safety. Instead, he was placed in a bunk room with about 15 other men where he was strangled.

When a guard started a security check more than 90 minutes late at another county site, blood was pooling under a cell door and a detainee was wiping the walls. Inside, the officer found the man’s cellmate beaten, stabbed and without a pulse.

Killings are relatively rare in American jails, but those in Riverside County experienced a surge in them. They had the highest homicide rate among large jails in California from 2020 through 2023, according to state data. The murders and other deaths made the county’s five jails the second-deadliest in the nation during that period. In 2022, the jail system’s worst year, 19 detainees would die from homicides, suicides, overdoses and natural causes.

There were clear patterns of security lapses, negligence and policy violations that contributed to the six homicides in the county jails from 2020 through last year, The New York Times and The Desert Sun found. Similar issues were factors in the other deaths from this time period, previous reporting shows.

An examination of the killings revealed that more than half the guards at one jail were performing security checks far less frequently than required, and often one to two hours late. They also failed to act during the fatal attacks or suspicious activity related to them caught on surveillance cameras, which are supposed to be constantly monitored.

In four homicides, detainees were assigned to cells that put them at greater risk, contrary to standard practices of separating detainees by race, sexual orientation and other factors, including a history of violent crimes, that could stoke conflict.

When deaths occurred, subsequent investigations were often flawed, The Times and The Sun found. Internal and public reports about the killings from the Sheriff’s Department established inaccurate timelines, omitted relevant facts and sometimes added false information, including a security check that never happened. Such reports had the effect of concealing from the public and detainees’ families consequential failures and decisions.

This article draws on more than 75 department reports, photos and videos of the deaths, internal documents detailing jail staffing and interviews with current and former employees.

The Riverside County sheriff, Chad Bianco, who took office in 2018 and was re-elected four years later, implemented substantial staffing changes over that period, significantly reducing training requirements for guards. He declined to comment for this article or respond to questions. The union representing guards in the county jails also did not respond to requests for comment.

Sheriff Bianco, a vocal Trump partisan, is now campaigning to win the Republican nomination for California governor. He has regularly bashed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and put blame for the jail deaths on the state’s left-leaning legislators.

But as the body count has risen, so has scrutiny of his department. The California Department of Justice has been conducting a civil rights investigation, and more than a dozen lawsuits making wrongful death claims have been filed against Riverside County, which has paid more than $13.3 million in settlements.

The morning after a detainee killing in September 2022 at the county jail in Murrieta, an administrator told sergeants to audit video to ensure that security checks were adhering to state law.

What was at stake, Lt. Aaron Martin wrote in an email obtained by The Times and The Sun, was the threat of civil litigation.

“Due to the recent overdoses and deaths, it is important for you to understand how to properly conduct and document security checks to protect yourself and the Department from liability issues,” the email began. “Whenever these catastrophic situations occur, security checks are heavily scrutinized.”

Little Training, Big Consequences

Hours before he was thrown from the Murrieta jail’s second floor, Mark Spratt, 24, had been charged with fraud after he was caught with stolen debit cards. He had several convictions for vehicle theft in neighboring San Bernardino County, but his crimes involved nothing like the violence he would fall victim to.

He was placed in a cell with Micky Payne, 35, who had three previous felony convictions, one for trying to take a gun from a police officer and two for domestic violence. In January 2023, he was awaiting sentencing for attacking a man with a broken bottle.

Mr. Payne was an admitted gang member and had recently fought with a cellmate, said Brynna Popka, a lawyer representing Mr. Spratt’s family. On the day Mr. Payne was sentenced to two years in state prison, Mr. Spratt was sent to share his cell.

From the start, there was trouble. Surveillance footage shows that Mr. Payne blocked entry to the cell in a brief standoff. (The Sheriff’s Department has not publicly released the video.) Mr. Payne, who is Black, later complained on a phone call that a white man had been put in his cell, according to a department report.

Five current and former jail supervisors said that Mr. Payne’s altercation with his previous cellmate, along with the bottle attack, should have triggered a behavioral health assessment or the more restrictive custody often used for dangerous detainees. Along with the racial issues, the disparity in the men’s records — violent crimes versus small-scale fraud — should have led the jail to classify them differently and not pair them up, according to the veteran employees. (They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.)

At the time, there was upheaval in the Riverside jails.

The department had long required deputies to start their careers in the jail system. But many objected. Sheriff Bianco promised to do away with jail assignments during his campaign in 2018. In 2022, as the nation began to emerge from the pandemic, he was eager to deliver.

He increased the number of jail staff and leadership positions that would be filled by correctional deputies. They are paid significantly less than deputy sheriffs, can start at age 18 instead of 21 and complete training in less than three months rather than six.

That change drained critical experience and training from the jails, according to the five veteran employees. The surge in violence and detainee deaths that followed, they said, was a consequence.

Internal emails obtained by The Times and The Sun included spreadsheets tracking the shifts in jail staffing. The number of sworn deputies dropped from about 180 in March 2022 to 65 by the following November. The first of the 19 deaths came in April that year.

Michael Lujan, who had retired as a sheriff’s captain before he challenged Sheriff Bianco in the 2022 election, said it was invaluable to have experienced jail workers at all levels who know how to effectively communicate with people in custody, and to make sound decisions when situations become volatile.

“I’m not casting blame on the hardworking young people in these difficult assignments,” Mr. Lujan said in an interview. “It was a managerial error to move veteran workers out of the jails and create an experience deficiency that builds on itself.”

While the county jails had, on average, a killing every two years during the last two decades, three homicides occurred at the Murrieta jail over just four months.

Mr. Spratt’s was one of them. In Cell 43, he appeared to be asleep when deputies did a security check just after midnight on Jan. 12, 2023. But about 1:30 a.m., neighboring detainees alerted deputies that a fight had broken out inside.

Correctional Deputy Nicolas Sevilla, who had finished training just six months earlier, did not intervene, however. When told of the conflict, he didn’t leave his post in the central control room — about 50 feet away — but turned on the lights and told the two men over the intercom to stop fighting, according to a department report.

Minutes later, he remotely unlocked and opened the door to the cell, the report said.

That was highly unusual. Several of the former supervisors said it was typical practice for deputies to alert other guards, go outside the cell where a fight was occurring, try to de-escalate verbally, then use pepper spray or another deterrent. Opening the door, they added, created a chaotic, dangerous situation.

Mr. Spratt was on the floor of the cell. Mr. Payne then dragged him, exited the cell and threw him over the nearby handrail, according to the report and video images from the subsequent criminal case.

Doctors at a nearby medical center found that Mr. Spratt had sustained facial fractures, a broken leg and spine and a torn aorta. He underwent emergency surgery but did not survive.

In later commenting on the death, Sheriff Bianco falsely claimed that Mr. Spratt had a history of violent crime and that the two detainees had gotten along as cellmates for three months. The jail system, in reporting the death to the California Department of Justice, wrote that Mr. Spratt was Black, while the autopsy report — and his own family — said he was white.

Fatal Errors

The placement of detainees contributed to other killings at the Riverside jails. It’s standard at jails around the country to house detainees according to demographics, gang affiliations, records of violence and any medical and behavioral health issues. While strict segregation isn’t always necessary or possible, these factors typically are carefully considered.

“If you are following your training and guidelines, you should be able to effectively reduce the risk of this kind of violence,” Mr. Lujan, the former captain, said of the homicides. “Think of the thousands of people who have cycled through the jails in years past without a problem here and in other counties.”

Scott Lowder, 55, for example, had previous convictions for violent crimes and had been incarcerated since May 2024 for threatening to kill a gas station attendant with a knife. Two current and former jail employees said that Mr. Lowder was incorrectly classified when he was booked. Despite his record, he was permitted access to tools in the print shop at the jail in Banning during a vocational program for low-risk defendants. On Sept. 7 last year, while a teacher was present without any guards, he stabbed Steve Deleon Gonzalez, 36, another detainee, with a screwdriver. The victim later died from the wound.

Rosendo Echevarria, 29, was held at the same jail after returning from treatment to improve his mental competency so he could stand trial. His mental health issues and the crimes he was accused of — child sexual assaults — made him a target in a barracklike unit with about 15 other detainees.

On Sept. 8, 2020, three days after his arrival, three of them strangled him while others played cards and chess nearby, video images show. One man convicted in the killing later told a reporter that deputies had told some of the detainees to check out the charges against Mr. Echevarria.

At the Murrieta jail, Kaushal Niroula, 41, was awaiting retrial on homicide charges in the 2008 killing, with five others, of an art collector in Palm Springs whom they had intended to defraud. Ms. Niroula, who had been transitioning to female while in custody and had H.I.V., should have been considered for segregation for her own safety, according to jail policies.

Instead, she was housed with Rodney Sanchez, 63, a man accused of several violent child sexual assaults. After six months sharing a cell, he strangled her on September 6, 2022.

He later pleaded guilty and told detectives he had been annoyed by Ms. Niroula’s talk of possible release after an upcoming trial. At that point, he had been jailed more than six years.

Violence can break out at any point when people are incarcerated, but long stays in jails and prisons can be associated with more conflict and attacks. The Riverside jails tend to hold people longer than those in most other California counties.

Sheriff Bianco and District Attorney Mike Hestrin both tout their tough-on-crime stances. Many suspects are kept in jail for long periods awaiting trial because the prosecutors’ office offers plea bargains far less often than its counterparts in the state. That leads to packing the jails and backlogs in the courts.

Riverside County’s share of the jail population awaiting resolution of a felony case rose from 59 percent to 86 percent between 2015 and 2024, data shows. That is one of the highest rates in the state.

In the jail killings, some victims and their attackers had been held for long periods. Ms. Niroula had been incarcerated for nearly 12 years, with a stint in state prison. Mr. Echevarria had been in custody for seven years. The three men accused of strangling him had collectively spent more than seven years in jail before the attack.

A Lack of Accountability

When a detainee is killed, the Sheriff’s Department initiates a series of inquiries that are essential to criminal prosecutions and internal assessments.

But reports of those investigations in Riverside County are often marked by errors and omissions, The Times and The Sun found. In some cases, the reports appeared to cover up serious security lapses.

The flaws were particularly striking in reports about the death of Ulysses Munoz Ayala, 39, held on an assault charge, at the Murrieta jail on Sept. 29, 2022.

Just three weeks after Ms. Niroula’s killing there, Correctional Deputy Mario Correa saw a detainee inside his cell smeared with blood. He was focused on cleaning the walls while his cellmate lay face down under a white sheet, blood flowing under the door.

“Is he breathing?” the guard asked the man, Erik Martinez, now 33, who stopped abruptly and shrugged.

Mr. Munoz Ayala, the cellmate, was unresponsive. Emergency workers declared him dead about 20 minutes later.

An autopsy found he had a skull fracture and seven puncture wounds to the neck. He and his cellmate had both been drinking alcohol, reports show. Mr. Martinez later admitted to the killing and told investigators that the men had argued about a rap song. He had been arrested about a year earlier after an unprovoked attack on a man outside a laundromat, killing him by repeated stabs to the neck.

Within days of the jail murder, two detectives from the department wrote reports for the criminal case. They referred to video footage, saying the two men entered their cell at 2:36 p.m. and it remained locked until 4:21 p.m., when Deputy Correa, the guard, did a security check. An internal investigator for the jail claimed that Mr. Munoz Ayala was “last seen alive” at 2:36 p.m., and a coroner deputy added that a routine security check was performed at 2:48 p.m., which no other report asserts.

But the timeline wasn’t true. Footage obtained by The Times and The Sun shows that the two men moved freely outside their second-tier cell up until 3 p.m. that day, almost a half-hour later than claimed, and interacted with others from the first tier who had been let out to use the common room.

It is not known if those interactions contributed to the death or the cellmates’ acquisition of alcohol, but allowing detainees from multiple tiers out at the same time is a security violation. Deputies assigned to monitor surveillance video should have noticed the men moving throughout the cell block and called for intervention, the current and former employees said.

One of the detectives on the criminal case discovered the inaccuracies about 10 months later. He had asked the jail’s internal investigator for the footage while preparing for a court hearing, but was given video missing a crucial 20-minute portion. He obtained the complete video from someone else and wrote a revised timeline.

The video showed that after the two men returned to their cell, another detainee noticed a confrontation inside. After looking in the cell window at 3:49 p.m., the detainee alerted others in the common room, making a stabbing motion to his neck. Men from the lower tier gathered nearby, and several appear to have communicated with Mr. Martinez as he was wiping down the cell. All of that would have been considered suspicious activity, but deputies — some of whom are assigned to monitor security cameras — apparently didn’t notice and didn’t intervene until Deputy Correa’s security check more than 30 minutes later.

The Sheriff’s Department did not appear to take issue with these lapses and discrepancies. Instead, another internal investigator focused on the deputy’s late security checks in a report about seven months after the killing.

The investigator told Deputy Correa that he had been 97 minutes late for the security check when he discovered the body, which the deputy eventually conceded. During an interview, the guard said he had been trained to start a security check an hour after the previous one had been completed, even if he was running behind. Jail policy requires 12 security checks in a 12-hour shift, however, and a log for the day of the killing shows that Deputy Correa and his partner did only 10. Of those, seven were late.

The report found that, like Deputy Correa, many newer staff members — nearly 100 at the Murrieta jail — had been incorrectly trained, performing checks one to two hours late. Ultimately, investigators attributed the lapses to the jail’s software system and cleared Deputy Correa.

Mr. Munoz Ayala was the last of seven deaths at that jail in 2022. Deputy Correa was on shift during three of them, including one overdose and one apparent suicide. State law requires hourly security checks in case there is need for emergency medical treatment. Civil cases filed by the survivors of those seven detainees assert that a late security check was a contributing factor.

Nearly three years after Mr. Munoz Ayala’s murder, his former cellmate pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.

But the Sheriff’s Department is still reporting to the California Department of Justice that Mr. Munoz Ayala’s death is under investigation and his cause of death pending. Accurately reporting that he was murdered would further raise the county jails’ homicide rate.

Justin Mayo contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.

The post In California Jails, a Rash of Homicide and Negligence appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

“What is your emergency?” responded a voice, captured on video footage from a camera in the cell. It was a deputy about 50 feet away, in the control room of the women’s mental health unit where Upton, 21, was being held.

“It’s not an emergency, but —” she began, then the deputy cut off the call before she could finish. Charged with a misdemeanor, Upton was awaiting a court-ordered evaluation to determine whether she was competent to stand trial.

She took a few more listless steps, the video shows. She paused beneath a buzzing fluorescent light, then picked up a white bedsheet and said, “It’s time to hang myself.”

She was found, limp, 20 minutes later. In the interim, the camera recorded the young woman preparing to end her life. But no guards, who were tasked with monitoring the video feed, noticed until it was too late.

Upton was the first of 19 detainees at Riverside County jails to die in 2022. That total, the highest the department had reported in at least three decades, ranked the jail system among the most lethal in the nation that year.

The deaths, attributed to homicide, overdose, natural causes or suicide, reflected troubling patterns: neglect by jail employees, access to illicit drugs, and cell assignments that put detainees at increased risk of violence or did not allow for close oversight.

The suicides — at least three of the deaths, but most likely four — offer particular insight into some of those institutional problems and lapses, an investigation by The New York Times and The Desert Sun found.

The county Sheriff’s Department failed at times to adequately monitor detainees and intervene when they attempted suicide. Guards did not always enforce rules prohibiting detainees with mental illnesses from blocking cell windows and cameras, which hinders the required safety monitoring. The department has often isolated detainees with severe mental illness, which can exacerbate suicidal intentions.

And, the investigation found, the department has omitted pertinent facts about the deaths in communications to the families of the dead and to the public.

The department has assumed no responsibility for these deaths. California’s attorney general last year opened an ongoing civil rights investigation into the increase in deaths in custody, and Riverside County agreed to pay more than $12 million to settle lawsuits linked to detainee deaths going back to 2020. At least a dozen cases are still pending.

The county sheriff, Chad Bianco, did not respond to interview requests or comment on detailed questions about the news organizations’ findings. But on an episode of his podcast this summer devoted to inmate deaths, he said that it can be extremely difficult at times to prevent suicides, and falsely claimed that there had never been any allegation that the department had “somehow done something wrong, or mishandled inmates, or mistreated inmates, or caused their death.”

The president of the deputies union declined to comment.

To understand how the suicides occurred, The New York Times and The Desert Sun interviewed dozens of people including current and former jail employees, relatives of the dead, independent medical examiners and civil rights lawyers. The news organizations also reviewed court documents, including arrest records, detainee medical and mental health records, and department notes on jail housing decisions.

Many of the details in this article have never been publicly reported, including the jail security camera footage reviewed by a reporter — material that is rarely seen by outsiders. The department has not released that footage or a dozen other videos requested by the news organizations under the California Public Records Act.

The suicides strongly suggest that, despite a federal class-action suit a decade ago that exposed deficiencies in mental health treatment in Riverside County jails and resulted in new court-ordered requirements, problems persist.

One detainee in 2022, who told guards that he was suicidal, was cleared after a medical check to return to his cell without any suicide-watch protocol. He was found dead about an hour later. He had been in custody for one day.

Another man, who suffered from schizoaffective disorder, had been mostly segregated from other detainees for two years when he was found hanging, and later died. To conceal his actions, he had covered his cell window and camera without any intervention from guards.

There were 14 deaths in Riverside County jails in 2023. No suicides were reported, though the cause of death in five of those cases is still “pending investigation,” according to the California Department of Justice. Earlier this year, a man hanged himself while another detainee tried to alert jail guards but couldn’t get their attention.

That suicide and a separate drug overdose prompted Capt. Alyssa Vernal, then the head of the jail, to warn staff members that they were failing to maintain basic jail operating standards — including some of the same lapses identified years ago by the federal court.

Vernal, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, wrote in an internal email reviewed by the news organizations, “It has become obvious we are not keeping house or following the rules we should be.”

‘Kept saying she was fine’

When she was 19, Alicia Upton hit the road and left everything behind. She piled into a friend’s car in West Virginia and embarked on what would become a cross-country trip.

In an interview, her mother, Nichole Thompson, recalled believing that she was going on a fleeting adventure before settling back home. “She was resolute when she fixed her mind on something,” said Thompson, a librarian who raised Alicia and her older sister in the Appalachian town of Lost Creek.

From a young age, Alicia was an animal lover who would bring home rabbits and raccoons she hoped to keep as pets. At 14, she sold the Xbox she had gotten for Christmas to buy a horse, which she trained herself. To raise money for the road trip, she sold her four-wheeler and some goats, but not the horse, which she left in the care of a friend.

Upton had shown no signs of mental health problems when she left home, her mother said. She had gone to counseling years earlier after the suicide of a close friend, and her mother felt that she was resilient.

The road trip took Upton to Florida, Texas, and across the country through New Mexico and Arizona. Finally, she called home from Hemet, a former farming town now sprouting strip malls and tract houses. It is near the western end of Riverside, one of the state’s fastest-growing counties, which extends from the Arizona border almost to Los Angeles.

She sounded happy, her mother recalled. She said California was beautiful. As the weeks wore on, though, she mentioned that the car needed costly repairs and that she was often looking for places to sleep.

“I walked a fine line, trying to coax her to come back, but also let her have her freedom,” Thompson said. While some companions left for new destinations, Upton stayed put.

As the months turned into a year, it became clear to Thompson that her daughter was living on the streets. “She always knew coming home was an option,” Thompson said. “If I pushed her, I felt she would disconnect. She just kept saying she was fine.”

Soon, Thompson became concerned that her daughter might be struggling with drugs. She recalled Upton saying irrational things on the phone, like describing seeing relatives who were thousands of miles away.

Eventually, Upton was arrested twice for minor offenses — shoplifting and trespassing. Both times, she was released. But a third arrest was different.

On April 19, 2022, a woman found Upton on her land in San Jacinto. She later told deputies the young woman appeared to be looking for something. When the landowner found a knife on the ground, the two had a confrontation. Upton left and no one was injured. But she was arrested nearby and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and making criminal threats, both misdemeanors.

The paper trail of Upton’s incarceration describes her as distraught and combative on arrival at the Robert

Detention Center in the city of Riverside. Of the five jails in the county, it is the facility where detainees who need mental health care are most often sent. Reports from the booking note that she did not sign several required documents. One jailer wrote on the signature line that she could not be trusted with a pen.

She was given a mental health rating of “severe” and placed in the women’s mental health housing unit, where each cell was monitored by camera. She was not prescribed any medication. When asked if she had ever attempted suicide, she would not answer.

But, deputies wrote in her file, she said she had “multiple personality disorder” and “stated that she ‘always kinda wanted to die.’”

A surge in jail deaths

Long before Upton was sent to the jail, the Sheriff’s Department had struggled to treat mental illnesses among the nearly 3,700 detainees it housed on any given day.

In jail and prison systems across the country, the population of people with mental health needs has surged in recent decades. More than half the detainees in California’s jails have such problems, a 2023 study found. As Riverside County’s jails began to operate as de facto mental health facilities, some detainees who claimed mistreatment took action.

Four sued the county in federal court in 2013, in what would become a class action, claiming the department was not providing adequate care.

When a judge ordered experts to inspect the claims, Dr. Bruce Gage, then chief of psychiatry for the Washington State Department of Corrections, found multiple problems. Some detainees were not receiving prescribed medications. Others were being medicated indefinitely on mere suppositions of mental illness. It was unclear whether the call buttons in the cells even worked.

Gage reported that the jails didn’t monitor suicidal detainees who were awaiting transfer to psychiatric facilities. The jails had no protocol in place to transition someone who was no longer considered suicidal into less-restrictive living conditions. Detainees either were in a general population and could be outside their cells for hours a day, or confined for all but 15 to 45 minutes.

“Riverside County jail system is amongst the most restrictive correctional settings I have visited,” Gage wrote. Those struggling with mental illness, he added, are “placed at greater risk of harming themselves under these conditions.”

Based on the reports, in 2016 a judge ordered a remedial plan that included ongoing inspections of the facilities and the threat of court intervention. Gage noted that the department had faced a staffing shortage since the 2009 recession, but emphasized that basic standards of care were required by law.

Sara Norman, one of the plaintiffs lawyers in the case, said that the jail had made progress in improving medical care, but less so with mental health care. “We have been concerned for years about the dearth of programming and group and individual therapy for people struggling with mental illness in the jails,” she said.

Meanwhile, the county system experienced an increase in jail deaths over the past decade. Among them was a man in 2020 who had been arrested for drug possession and was to be released with a citation for a later court appearance. Instead, he died after being violently extracted from his jail cell by guards while experiencing symptoms of psychosis. His relatives received $7.5 million this year to settle a lawsuit.

The surge of 19 deaths in 2022 made Riverside’s rate the second-highest in the state, behind Kern County, which had a much smaller jail population. Among the nation’s 15 largest jail systems, Riverside was the second-most deadly, with a rate more than twice that of Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas.

While some people at the Riverside jails were serving criminal sentences, most — including those who died by suicide — were detainees awaiting trial or other resolution of their cases.

Robert Robinson, 41, was arrested in September 2022 for trying to cash a fraudulent check at a casino. Because he was a gang dropout, he was considered a likely target of violence and was housed alone.

He told jailers while being booked that he was having suicidal thoughts, according to a lawsuit filed by his relatives. He was placed in a cell without a camera and was not put on suicide watch, records show.

The next day, he told deputies he was suicidal, and he met with a medical provider and a mental health nurse, according to court documents. Both cleared him to return to his cell alone. About an hour later, a deputy discovered that he had hanged himself.

Riverside County settled the civil suit with his relatives this past August for $1.8 million, with no admission of wrongdoing. His family did not respond to requests for comment.

Aaron Aubrey, 28, had an extensive history of mental illness and violence. During his three-year incarceration awaiting trial on a murder charge, he was housed in a mental health unit. He spent significant time in isolation after he was charged with killing another detainee in 2020.

In December 2022 a guard saw that Aubrey had blocked his window and covered his camera, but took no action, according to the coroner’s report. During another security check 40 minutes later, the detainee was found hanging. He died six days later at a hospital.

And this year, Reynaldo Ramos, 55, hanged himself even as a cell neighbor twice tried to alert guards over the intercom, according to a complaint filed with the county by the man’s relatives. The guards didn’t respond, the complaint said.

The claim attributed that account to an anonymous letter sent to the family’s lawyer and separately to a reporter for The Times and The Desert Sun, containing those closely guarded details. A person who had reviewed jail surveillance video of the unit also described the failed alert efforts.

Ramos, who had been given a mental health rating of severe when admitted to the jail on drug charges, was discovered unresponsive during a routine safety check, according to an internal incident report provided to the Times.

‘Man down!’

In the days after Upton’s arrest, her mind continued to fray.

On April 28, 2022, a judge ordered her to undergo a mental competency evaluation. Her criminal case was suspended, and with it the possibility of bail, until the findings were reported. When she was admitted to the jail, she had briefly been placed in a safety cell, without access to items that could be used for self-harm. Soon after, she was placed in the mental health unit.

That evening, the surveillance video showed, she was restless. Her cellmate was asleep on the top bunk as Upton paced and looked out of the cell door’s window. Meal trays were stacked at the foot of the bed and clothes were scattered nearby.

At 8:13 p.m., she pressed the intercom button, but got only a few words out before the deputy hung up. Moments later, Upton can be heard in the video saying she intends to hang herself.

She looped the bedsheet around her neck and, for a few minutes, tried anchoring it. She smacked her head three times. She looked toward the camera. At one point, it sounded as if she was weeping.

Sitting on the bottom bunk, she tied the sheet above her and tightened it around her neck.

At 8:18 p.m., Upton raised a middle finger to the cell camera. Over the next few minutes, the video captured her final movements. By 8:22, she was still.

It all unfolded in view of the deputies who were supposed to monitor the feed from her cell. A guard at a workstation near the control room was responsible for constantly tracking the video footage of the unit, according to three former jail employees speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the department.

Meanwhile, a deputy in the control room reminded a trainee to occasionally scan the images. They looked up at the feeds from the roughly 40 cameras, two of the former employees said. Spotting Upton, the deputy shouted over the radio, “Man down!”

She had been hanging by the bedsheet for 16 minutes before guards flashed lights signaling an emergency, video footage shows. Two deputies and a jail nurse entered her cell and began resuscitation efforts, but it was futile.

The next morning, back in West Virginia, Upton’s mother woke to pounding on her door, she recalled in an interview. It was a local deputy, who told her to call the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

She remembers asking, “Does this mean she’s dead?”

Yes.

“I thought my heart would stop,” she said.

The sheriff is the coroner

In Riverside County, the final accounting of how people die depends to a large extent on Sheriff Bianco.

A veteran of the department, Bianco was first elected sheriff in 2018. He has cast himself as a right-wing firebrand at odds with the state’s left-leaning legislature and governor. He has also criticized Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s investigation of jail deaths as a “political stunt.”

California is one of just three states that allow elected law enforcement officials to oversee coroners’ offices. Until recently in Riverside County, that meant the Sheriff’s Department typically investigated deaths at its jails while also supervising the pathologists conducting the autopsies. (This year, the department began outsourcing those autopsies.) The final report about the cause of death is signed by the sheriff, who also serves as the coroner.

The state Legislature has considered bills to separate the offices but none have passed. The California Medical Assn. has long advocated a separation, saying that the consolidation of the responsibilities of sheriff and coroner is an “immense conflict of interest.”

The New York Times and The Desert Sun found discrepancies when comparing the department’s public death summaries of the 2022 suicides against jail records turned over in civil suits, the video of Upton’s death and information provided by current and former employees.

Mario Solis, who had a history of mental illness, was jailed after a scuffle with a grocery store security guard over a stolen bag of Skittles, according to court records. In September 2022, his mother, Sara Solis, was told that he had died alone in a cell — but not much else. About six months later, she received the department’s summary report.

It included findings from an autopsy conducted days after Solis, 31, died in the mental health unit of the jail in Murrieta. Inside his mouth and throat were two pencils, a toothbrush, a plastic cap and bars of soap, the report said. It also noted cut marks on his arms.

A deputy coroner wrote that Solis had “an unspecified mental health history” and had been prescribed two psychiatric medications.

Sheriff Bianco attributed Solis’s death to suffocation and blood loss after his jugular vein was punctured. He certified the death as an accident.

More than a year later, a lawyer representing the Solis family in a suit against the county received a trove of information the Sheriff’s Department had not previously disclosed. Jail medical staff had treated Solis for schizophrenia, including with antipsychotic medication. On three occasions, he said he was suicidal and talked about stabbing himself with a pencil.

During a chaotic five-month incarceration, he was transferred 10 times among four county jails and did two stints in intensive psychiatric treatment.

From the start, Solis had pleaded for help and medication, his scribbled notes show: “I am not well. Please help me before things worsen,” one read. In another, he requested a psychiatric visit, which was arranged but later canceled.

On Sept. 2, 2022, Solis was ruled incompetent to stand trial and ordered to a hospital for treatment. The next day, he was found unconscious in his cell. He had lacerations on his wrist and neck, a nurse wrote. His neck was red and bruised. His mouth and nose were bloody.

Photos of the cell show flooding from the toilet that soaked books and trash. One wall was filled with erratic writing.

The department’s reports do not explain why Sheriff Bianco determined that the death was accidental.

Bianco has accused media outlets and advocacy groups of misrepresenting the jail deaths to the public, including on his podcast episode on the topic, which was promoted on the department’s social media channels. Without naming names, the sheriff said that a detainee who had died after swallowing objects, including a pencil, had a “propensity to eat things.”

“They suffocated themselves, basically,” Mr. Bianco said. “But we don’t believe it was a suicide.”

In 1,600 pages of jail medical notes, there is no mention of Solis habitually swallowing harmful objects, as the sheriff claimed.

“This is not someone who accidentally died,” Hugo Solis, one of Solis’s brothers, said in an interview. “He killed himself in despair. And the sheriff knows that.”

A forensic pathologist and a medical anthropologist reviewed the coroner’s report for this article. Both said that, aside from the mention of Solis’s psychiatric history and prescriptions, it was unclear whether the coroner staff had reviewed his extensive mental health records or knew about his suicide threats. Both said that information was crucial for determining whether the death was a suicide.

Dr. Judy Melinek, a board-certified forensic pathologist, asked, “Why was he left alone and unsupervised after showing severe signs of mental health deterioration?”

‘It was their job’

Thompson, Alicia Upton’s mother, said she was stunned at how little information the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department would share about her daughter’s death.

For weeks, she said, she struggled to learn even basic details about the events leading up to the suicide. She asked to see any reports and obtain any surveillance video, though she wasn’t sure if she could bear to watch it. But the department declined to provide much of the material she requested.

Thompson sued the Sheriff’s Department last year, saying that it had failed to monitor and protect her daughter. In its response, the county denied that deputies had failed to monitor Upton at the time of her suicide. However, according to two former employees, two jail workers faced discipline for lapses.

When a reporter described to Thompson the footage from the jail cell, she said she had long suspected that her daughter had been desperate for help — but had been ignored.

“It was their job to keep her safe,” Thompson said. “It was their job to monitor her. They didn’t care to do it.”

Christopher Damien is a reporter with the Desert Sun, reporting about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities. He is part of The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship. This article is co-published with the Los Angeles Times. Justin Mayo and Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research. This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

The post Riverside County: The deadliset year in one of America’s deadliest jail systems appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The jail system has reported its highest number of detainee deaths in decades, including several suicides, the New York Times reported. Deaths were reported as homicide, overdose, natural causes and suicide.

Alicia Upton, who died of suicide in 2022, was one of 19 people who died in custody that year. It was the system’s most lethal year in more than three decades. Upton was one of at least four suicides, the newspaper reported.

Neglect by jail employees, access to drugs and cell assignments put detainees at increased risk throughout 2022, the New York Times reported.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has reportedly assumed no responsibility for the deaths. County sheriff Chad Bianco did not respond to interview requests with the New York Times.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a civil rights investigation into the sheriff’s office last year, citing concerns over its jail facilities.

“Whether you have a loved one in jail or are worried about crime in your neighborhood, we all benefit when there is action to ensure the integrity of policing in our state,” Bonta wrote.

The newspaper reported five key takeaways about the jail system:

1. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department failed to adequately monitor detainees and intervene when they attempted suicide

2. Mentally ill detainees were able to block cell cameras and cell door windows even though the rules forbade it.

3. Deputies did not relocate detainees who expressed suicidal thoughts to cells where they could be monitored at all times.

4. The sheriff’s department left out important information about the deaths to the public and to the detainee’s families.

5. Riverside County paid out millions of dollars in settlements related to detainee deaths.

Read more from the New York Times: Inside a Deadly Southern California Jail System: 5 Takeaways

The post RivCo Has One Of The Deadliest Jail Systems In U.S.: Report appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.