The report, titled “After a Decade of Record Deaths in County Jails, the Community Deserves Transparency Through Oversight,” urges county leaders to establish an independent civilian oversight body to monitor jail operations and review critical incidents involving inmates.

 According to the Grand Jury, Riverside County remains one of the largest counties in California without a formal civilian oversight system for sheriff operations and county detention facilities. The report concludes that current oversight mechanisms are largely internal and lack the independence necessary to identify systemic issues or maintain public confidence.

 The findings come amid years of scrutiny surrounding Riverside County’s jail system. In 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a civil rights investigation into the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office following concerns over a rising number of in-custody deaths and allegations involving jail conditions.

 The Grand Jury reported that 29 inmates died while in Riverside County custody between the start of the state investigation and April 2026.

 Jurors found that investigations into inmate deaths often lack independence and that public reporting on jail operations remains inconsistent and limited. The report also criticized the Sheriff’s Advisory Committee, concluding that it has not provided meaningful oversight or produced documented recommendations regarding jail operations.

 To address those concerns, the Grand Jury recommended that the Riverside County Board of Supervisors establish an independent civilian oversight body with investigative authority, dedicated staffing, public reporting requirements and the ability to review critical incidents and deaths occurring within county jails.

 The report also recommends an independent audit of jail medical and mental health services, the creation of a public data dashboard and the development of a long-term strategic plan for county jail operations.

 The recommendations revive a debate that surfaced last year when the Board of Supervisors considered creating an oversight body for the sheriff’s department. In July 2025, supervisors ultimately declined to move forward with the proposal.

 Sheriff Bianco responded forcefully to the report, rejecting its conclusions and accusing the Grand Jury of advancing a predetermined agenda.

 “The report is nothing but an attempt to pressure the Board of Supervisors into creating an oversight board and/or inspector general,” Bianco said in a statement. “The report is ridden with inaccuracies and patently false statements, combined with apples-to-oranges comparisons.”

 Bianco argued that the report reflects a misunderstanding of jail operations and the factors contributing to inmate deaths. He maintained that most deaths occurring in county custody involve fentanyl overdoses, suicides, natural causes or inmate-on-inmate violence rather than failures by jail staff.

 According to the sheriff, Riverside County’s correctional facilities continue to serve as a model for other counties throughout California and already operate under extensive state oversight.

 Bianco pointed to the California Board of State and Community Corrections, which regulates jail operations statewide, as well as ongoing court-ordered supervision by the Prison Law Office. He argued that the Grand Jury failed to adequately consider those existing oversight systems before making its recommendations.

 The sheriff also disputed claims that inmate deaths represent a systemic problem.

 “Going to jail does not prevent anyone from dying,” Bianco stated. “No one has died because they were in jail, they died while they were in jail.”

 He further contended that demands for civilian oversight are being driven by political activists rather than evidence of widespread misconduct within the department.

 The sheriff pledged that his office will submit the legally required response to the report but indicated that he does not intend to implement the oversight recommendations.

 “We will not implement any of their recommendations concerning oversight,” Bianco wrote.

 Under California law, Civil Grand Jury reports are advisory and do not carry the force of law. However, agencies named in the reports are required to provide written responses addressing the findings and recommendations.

 The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has 60 days to respond formally to the report, while the Riverside County Board of Supervisors has 90 days to issue its response.

 Whether county leaders act on the recommendations remains uncertain. The report, however, ensures that the debate over transparency, accountability and oversight within Riverside County’s jail system will remain a prominent issue in local government discussions for months to come.

Source: Riverside County Civil Grand Jury Report, News Channel 3 (KESQ), Riverside County Sheriff’s Office statement.

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    Speaking during the opening of budget hearings Monday at the County Administrative Center in Riverside, Bianco said the department requested roughly $250 million beyond what was included in the proposed spending plan. According to the sheriff, about $138 million of that amount is needed simply to maintain current staffing levels.

    “This is a massive number that we cannot recover from,” Bianco told supervisors. “The proposed budget for us is absolutely disastrous.”

    The sheriff said failing to secure the requested funding could force the department to eliminate as many as 622 patrol deputy positions. If cuts were focused on administrative and support staff instead, the total number of positions affected could climb to around 1,000.

    Bianco said any reductions of that scale would likely need to be phased in over several years to avoid severe impacts on public safety. He warned that unincorporated communities could feel the effects first as resources are shifted to maintain law enforcement services for the 17 cities that contract with the county.

    The budget shortfall would also affect major projects, according to the sheriff. Bianco said it would leave little chance of fully opening the Benoit Detention Center in Indio, moving forward with upgrades at the Ben Clark Public Safety Training Center or building a new hangar for the department’s aviation unit at March Air Reserve Base.

    Supervisor Jose Medina acknowledged the financial pressures facing the county and said all departments would need to share in the burden of spending reductions.

    “The pain needs to be distributed across the county departments,” Medina said. “As important as public safety is, it cannot be helped not to feel some of the pain.”

    Supervisor Chuck Washington also pointed to previous budget compromises while discussing the sheriff’s concerns. During a brief exchange, Bianco said he had previously refrained from publicly discussing jail funding issues because he was encouraged to avoid the topic during earlier budget hearings.

    District Attorney Mike Hestrin also appeared before the board, requesting an additional $14 million above the amount recommended by the county Executive Office. Hestrin said the funding would help maintain current staffing levels and cover labor-related costs.

    The district attorney noted that retirements and recruiting efforts by neighboring counties have reduced staffing levels in Riverside County. He said his office currently employs 228 prosecutors and continues to face growing workloads tied to state mandates.

    Part of Hestrin’s proposal includes creating a specialized cryptocurrency and cybercrimes unit. He said financial fraud schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and often target senior citizens, making quicker investigative responses necessary.

    Riverside County Fire Chief Robert Fish submitted the smallest request among public safety agencies, seeking an additional $900,000 to expand the county’s nurse navigation program. The initiative allows trained nurses to assist some callers over the phone, reducing unnecessary emergency responses.

    According to Fish, the program has successfully resolved about 3,000 medical calls since its launch in October, helping keep fire personnel available for more serious emergencies.

    County Chief Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said the county faces a projected $66 million structural deficit heading into the next fiscal year, even before considering the additional public safety requests.

    Van Wagenen recommended continuing a targeted hiring freeze and relying on reserve funds while county leaders work to address long-term financial challenges.

    “Growth is flattening,” Van Wagenen said. “We have to prioritize.”

    The proposed county budget totals approximately $10.34 billion, representing an increase of about 3.5% over the current fiscal year. County officials project reserve balances will reach roughly $650 million by the end of the year.

    Supervisors are expected to continue budget discussions this week, with tentative approval of the spending plan scheduled for June 23.

    Source: City News Service

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“I want to have this conversation in a safe space for everyone with differing viewpoints that would be productive,” Supervisor Chuck Washington said at the July 29 meeting. “I did not believe that the way this was brought forward would produce that, and so I’m not prepared to support this ad hoc committee at this point.”

Supervisor Jose Medina said his goal in bringing the item to the board was to provide the county, the sheriff’s department and the community a forum to discuss the issues and work together to come up with potential solutions through the ad hoc committee.

“In my 10 years of service in the state legislature, I sometimes think I’m doing a good job when I upset [or] piss off people on both sides of the issue, and I think I’ve done that here today,” Medina said at the meeting. “I’ve heard from the advocates that I’m not going fast enough, that it’s not doing enough all at once, [and] I’ve heard from those who are on the other side that I’m going too fast or that I’m not taking their points of view into consideration.”

For more than an hour, the board heard from members of the public, largely in support of sheriff oversight, which is allowed under AB 1185, even if not specifically in favor of the creation of the ad hoc committee.

“People want transparency. People want accountability. People want oversight of the [Riverside] County Sheriff’s Department,” Sky Allen, executive director of local advocacy group Inland Empire United, said at the meeting. “They’re tired of systems that protect power instead of protecting people. This isn’t about politics. It’s about…the pain of families who feel unheard, and the hope of residents who still believe the government can work for them. Please be bold for them today.”

Allen said her team and coalition partners had reached out to more than 7,500 residents all across the county over the last few months to hear their thoughts on the issue. Those responses have since been compiled into a comprehensive report the organization released last week.

Some of those who spoke at the meeting went into greater detail about what they found, including that people felt greater oversight of the department would increase trust and safety and reduce the number of in-custody deaths.

According to data first provided to The Riverside Record by the Riverside Sheriff Accountability Coalition (RSAC), one of the organizations spearheading oversight efforts, and confirmed with data obtained from the California Department of Justice’s Open Justice data portal, there have been 262 reported in-custody deaths between 2011 and 2024 in Riverside County. 

That number not only includes people who died while incarcerated at Riverside County jails, but also those who died during the process of arrest or at crime/arrest scenes. This data was also the basis for a report by CARE First California and RSAC published last fall.

Both Supervisor Karen Spiegel and Sheriff Chad Bianco called those numbers used by RSAC members who spoke at the meeting into question.

“We are here because of a lie…perpetuated by disingenuous politicians, activists and complicit media that dismisses the truth for sensationalist headlines that divide us,” Bianco said at the meeting. “And I will point out the headlines that some of them apparently read, because the numbers that they give you all, know are completely factually inaccurate.”

In an interview with The Record after the meeting, Luis Nolasco, senior policy advocate and organizer with the ACLU of Southern California and RSAC member, pushed back on that assertion.

“That data, in and of itself, that’s directly from the California Attorney General,” he said. “The sheriff’s department is mandated to report all this information about in-custody deaths to the state, so all that information that the attorney general has collected, and that we just asked for, and that was provided to us, it’s public information.”

That data, reported to the state by law enforcement agencies like the sheriff’s department, is collected by the California Department of Justice Criminal Justice Statistics center, updated as necessary and posted to the Open Justice data portal.

According to the dataset, which was last updated May 29, the total number of deaths spiked in 2021 when 12 people died while in the custody of county jails and 21 died during the process of arrest. The next year, 2022, the total number of deaths was 32 — 19 of whom died while in the custody of county jails, the highest number in the county’s history. Months later, Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into the department, which Bianco said was politically motivated.

“This is not about transparency, never has been,” Bianco, who first took office in 2019, said at the meeting. “A politically-motivated DOJ investigation from our attorney general cited ‘alarming reports of wrongdoing and civil rights violations and investigations.’ Mind you that those alarming reports came from the same anti-law enforcement activist groups you are hearing from today.”

Nolasco said RSAC’s calls for oversight of the department were not because of a political grudge against Bianco, who earlier this year announced his run for governor, but were instead a response to the lived experiences of those whose loved ones had died while in the custody of the sheriff’s department.

“For us, it’s all much bigger than just Bianco,” he said. “I think Bianco is a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is the systemic lack of accountability and transparency within this department.”

The total number of in-custody deaths fell to 21 in 2023. Fourteen of those deaths happened while people were in the custody of county jails, six died during the process of arrest and one was marked as “other,” according to the data. Last year, the total number of in-custody deaths dropped to 15, eight of which were people in the custody of county jails, six who died during the process of arrest and one death that was marked as “other.”

Bianco, in an interview with The Record, said that he gets “emotional” every time he gets the call that a person has died while in custody, but that it was impossible for the department to prevent people who are incarcerated from accidentally overdosing or killing themselves.

“It doesn’t mean we failed. It just means we weren’t successful, but we certainly didn’t fail,” he said. “And this anti-law enforcement, blame somebody else, don’t take accountability for your own failures, don’t take accountability for your family members’ failures or for the actions that they did and somehow blame me and, realistically, every single one of them file a lawsuit.”

The cost of those lawsuits was another issue brought up by those in support of a sheriff oversight committee.

“We are paying a massive price for these abuses, not just with our lives, but with the hundreds of millions of dollars we are wasting on [sheriff department] settlements,” Emma Li said. “We deserve, and we demand, real accountability and oversight, and you, the Board of Supervisors, can make this happen.”

According to county data obtained by The Record, the county has paid out more than $107 million for claims made against the sheriff’s department for incidents that happened between 2014 and 2024 as of March of this year. While some claims were paid out within days of the county being notified of the claim, others took nearly a decade to be considered resolved, according to the data.

It was not immediately clear how many pending claims there were against the department, though Riverside County Director of Communications Brooke Federico said between 80-90% of people who file claims do not receive any payment from the county. During the most recent fiscal year, she said 90% of claimants had their claims closed without payment.

It was also not immediately clear how many lawsuits had been filed against the department that were still pending as part of the claims process. The Record filed a California Public Records Act request with the county, though the county has requested an extension to fulfill the request.

When it came to the cost of settlements, Bianco said that they had “nothing to do with wrongdoing,” but were instead business decisions with which he did not agree. 

“I say fight them till the end, because all this is doing by settling these lawsuits is enabling,” he said in an interview with The Record. “These attorneys just keep filing bigger and bigger lawsuits, hoping for bigger and bigger settlements.”

Those in support of sheriff oversight also brought up what they felt was a lack of transparency from the department.

“The [proposed ad hoc] committee is not here to remove the elected sheriff, but to hold the sheriff’s department accountable to the core values of the department, which are integrity, honesty, honesty, honesty and professionalism,” Michael Lujan, a retired sheriff’s captain with 31 years of experience who lost to Bianco in the 2022 election, said at the meeting. “The truth, however painful, always finds its way into the light, and I think over the last few years we’ve been experiencing that through litigation.”

Bianco pushed back against the assertion that his department wasn’t transparent, stating in an interview with The Record that it has always been his position that the department release as much information as legally permitted.

“There [is] some information that we cannot give legally without a judge telling us to give, whether you request [it through] a public records request act or not,” he said. “And because we don’t give you that information, and we tell you why, you can’t say we’re lying. You can’t say we’re covering it up, you just didn’t get that.

“You can get it if you go to a judge and convince a judge that the judge should allow you to see that, you can get it then,” he continued. “But we’re not going to be held civilly liable for violating that law, because we gave you information that we were prevented from giving.”

He also said that there was a preexisting committee that already provides feedback to the department. That committee, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Advisory Committee, was created to “aid in the transparency” of the department, according to a private Facebook group description.

However, prior to last month’s meeting when three of the committee’s members addressed the board, Nolasco said neither he nor other RSAC members had known the identities of any of its members. Bianco said that was done deliberately to ensure the safety of the committee members.

“The reason why I refuse to give you their names is because from week one, when their names did get out, they were absolutely attacked by the activists that we have here, and not only them, their children in school, so I’m not going to give you their names,” he said at the meeting, noting that they were appointed by the sheriff’s department with input from the supervisors. “I was very surprised, thank you very much, to see them show up here today, because I didn’t want them here.”

Of the three self-identified members who spoke at the meeting, one was against the creation of the ad hoc committee and one was in support of increased oversight. All three are members of the private Facebook group.

“An oversight committee can provide an extra layer of support [along with] the existing measures to keep inmates safe from themselves and others,” Rick Saldivar, who said he had served on the committee since 2020, said at the meeting. “Furthermore, the implementation of an oversight committee can bring constructive impact to the sheriff’s department as a whole by promoting transparency, accountability and continuous improvement, and we can work towards creating a safer and more humane environment for both inmates and staff.”

However, Rodney Kyles called the idea “hogwash.”

“I had some preconceived ideas, until I met [Bianco] personally,” he said at the meeting. “He’s taken us through his whole department, every single aspect of it. If the issue comes up, he addresses it [and] we address it with him, so the transparency is there.”

Tamara Frazier, the final member of the committee who spoke at the meeting, had given time to Kyles, but said in her comments that she didn’t necessarily share his sentiments.

“I am here just to say that we are here,” she said. “He established this about four years ago, and we are here to work with anybody in the community that wants to talk to us. 

“We are the direct bridge between the community and the sheriff’s department,” she continued. “So if you have any concerns, I just advise you to reach out to us.”

Bianco told The Record the department has a list of people who want to be part of the committee that gets used to fill vacancies as they arise.

“When we lose people on the committee, we fill them, and have lots of people that reach out to say, ‘Hey, if there’s ever an opening, I want to be a part,’” he told The Record. “We haven’t lost very many lately. They like doing what they’re doing.”

Nolasco said he was able to connect with one of the members after the meeting and was looking forward to being able to talk with the group and learning more about their work, though he said that it was “truly bonkers” that information about a group with the stated aim of increasing transparency had not been made available to the general public prior to the July 29 meeting.

“There is not a single public trace anywhere on any county website or any public document that spells out the purpose of this advisory committee,” he said. “And something that is concerning to us is if this truly is a public body under the county, then they should be held under the same laws of the Brown Act.”

The California Brown Act governs open meetings in the state for all local agencies, inclusive of commissions and committees, and dictates regulations surrounding what constitutes a meeting, notice and agenda requirements, rights of the public and what is permissible to be discussed in closed session along with penalties and remedies for violations of the act.

According to a county official, the committee, which was voluntarily created by the sheriff’s department, is neither a legislative, governing nor statutorily required body.

“Based on the information available on the sheriff’s advisory committee, this group is not likely subject to the Brown Act,” Federico said in an email to The Record. “Please refer to the sheriff’s department for more information.”

In an emailed statement to The Record, Bianco said that the advisory committee was not subject to the Brown Act and “shouldn’t be.”

“From the formation of the committee, several members and their children were subjected to ridicule and harassment for participating in the committee,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about their safety and troubled by the constant demand and maneuvering from activist groups and the media to obtain their names.”

Those who spoke against the ad hoc committee and sheriff oversight generally at the meeting, including Desert Hot Springs Councilmember Dirk Voss and La Quinta Councilmember Steve Sanchez, said they felt the agenda item was politically motivated and would create additional costly and unnecessary bureaucracy.

“I look at this as nothing more than…a solution looking for a problem,” Voss said. “It’s creating unnecessary and politically-driven policy that will ultimately prove to be a bureaucracy of duplication, wasted time [and] unlawful investigations that will ultimately violate personnel rules and employee protections creating litigation and lawsuits.”

Bianco echoed their sentiments, stating at the meeting that the department was the “most scrutinized government office in our county,” with oversight already being provided by the supervisors, the executive office, the district attorney, the California Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice among other local, state and federal entities.

“Let me be very clear that this is not about transparency, and it is not about deaths,” he told the board, accusing Medina of bringing partisan politics into the county. “This is purely about political control and influence.”

Despite the outcome, Nolasco said RSAC would continue to push for greater oversight, transparency and accountability of the sheriff’s department.

“System change work is very slow, but I think if I were to have a conversation with myself from 2020 when we started this work, just the fact that we even had this item on a formal agenda for discussion, I think, was a victory in and of itself,” he said. “Was it the result we wanted? No, but I don’t think it was a loss.”

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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.

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In a video posted to social media Thursday, Bianco said his deputies “have not, are not and will not engage” in immigration enforcement, and pushed back at those claiming personnel from the Sheriff’s Office’s 4,000-member staff were actively involved in such operations.

“There has been an alarming increase in the concern over law enforcement and immigration,” he said. “Most of this is being caused by misinformation and fear mongering from dishonest politicians, social media, immigration activists and even disingenuous headlines from the media.”

Immigrant enforcement is the sole responsibility of the federal government, Bianco said, and rumors of Riverside County deputies conducting raids at county schools, businesses and churches “are simply not true.”

Bianco, a Republican and potential candidate for governor, did not specifically identify the individuals, organizations or outlets to which he was referring in his video message.

Bianco’s message comes as Border Patrol agents have conducted raids throughout the state this year, even before President Trump took office. One operation that began Jan. 7 resulted in 78 arrests in Bakersfield.

The raids have sparked outrage throughout Southern California, including days of protests in Los Angeles.

California’s sanctuary law, known as Senate Bill 54, was approved in 2017 and bars local law enforcement agencies from using public money to play a direct role in immigration enforcement. It also prohibits police from transferring people to immigration authorities except in certain cases, such as when people have been convicted of certain violent felonies and misdemeanors.

In an interview with Fox 11 L.A. in November, Bianco said he “will do everything in my power to make sure that I can keep the residents of Riverside County safe. If that involves working somehow around SB 54 with ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] so that we can deport these people that are victimizing us and victimizing my residents, you … can be sure that I’m going to do that.”

Bianco said the legislation drove a wedge between immigrant communities and law enforcement, and emphasized his deputies do not ask about immigration status when speaking with victims.

In his message Thursday, Bianco said he would “continue to fight to reform an extremely dangerous sanctuary state law forced upon us by reckless politicians that forces federal immigration officials from ICE into our communities to find these criminals, rather than removing them from the safety of our county jails.”

On Jan. 28, Riverside County’s Board of Supervisors approved a motion directing the county’s executive officer and county counsel to evaluate how data for the county’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients and “law abiding” undocumented immigrants is collected, managed and stored. It also directs county personnel to evaluate existing and potential new funding sources to support undocumented immigrants who face deportation.

County officials are supposed to report back to the board on Feb. 25.

Bianco was not present for the meeting, according to the Desert Sun, but wrote an email in which he admonished the board, saying they “should be working to ensure that county government is here to protect all residents, (not causing) a political divide.”

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Video from inside a Southern California jail shows a violent confrontation in October 2020 in which 10 sheriff’s deputies burst into the cell of a man who was having delusions and resisting medical care, restrained him and repeatedly shocked him, leading to his death days later.

Officials in Riverside County did not bring charges against any of the deputies involved in the encounter with the man, Christopher Zumwalt, 39, but quietly agreed in December 2023 to pay $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by his family.

Depositions from the case and video footage obtained by The New York Times show the frantic and violent minutes when deputies tried to force Mr. Zumwalt out of his cell as he paced and talked incoherently. In the video, deputies wearing helmets and shields toss canisters of pepper spray into the small concrete room, struggle with Mr. Zumwalt, and strap him to an emergency restraint chair. They cover his head with a spit mask and move him to another cell, where he sat unmonitored and appeared to stop breathing for at least five minutes. He died on Oct. 25, 2020, after experiencing cardiac arrest.

Mr. Zumwalt, who was arrested near his home on Oct. 22, 2020, on suspicion of public intoxication, was never charged with a crime, and the arrest report indicates that he was to be released with a citation after he sobered up from the methamphetamine he admitted to taking the night before. On the day of his arrest, he was issued a citation for bringing drugs into a jail.

In a statement Friday, Sheriff Chad Bianco said his deputies did nothing wrong and characterized the settlement as a business decision by lawyers that does not imply wrongdoing.

“The facts of this case clearly show the actions of our deputies were appropriate and lawful,” Sheriff Bianco said, adding that actions taken by Mr. Zumwalt in a “methamphetamine-induced psychosis caused his death.”

The practice of forcibly removing people from their cells, which is known as cell extraction, often turns violent, and has been a point of controversy and costly litigation in the county and across the country for years.

Another man died after a similar extraction from the same Riverside County jail in 2017. In 2018, a detainee died after a cell extraction in a San Diego County jail. In 2015, a 37-year-old woman died after Virginia deputies used a stun gun on her four times during an extraction. In 2010, a man died in a jail yard after being forced from his cell in Tennessee.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department ultimately reported Mr. Zumwalt’s death as a justified homicide, meaning he died as a result of police use of force determined by a county investigation to be legal. Later medical examinations cited other contributing factors, including methamphetamine overdose, lack of food and water, and asphyxiation from the use of restraints and pepper spray, but all found that the confrontation played a role in the cardiac arrest that killed him.

In most California counties, including Riverside, the sheriff also acts as the coroner, investigating the cause and manner of deaths.

Mr. Zumwalt’s death has not previously been reported by the news media, and the Sheriff’s Department had not acknowledged the court settlement publicly.

In recent years, there has been a surge in deaths at the jails in Riverside County.

Mr. Zumwalt was among 12 people to die in county custody in 2020. In 2022, deaths in the county’s five jails rose to 19 — nearly four times the county average of five deaths each year since 1980. The spike in jail deaths, in part, spurred a civil rights investigation by the California Justice Department into the department led by Sheriff Bianco, a powerful political force in the Inland Empire, the region east of Los Angeles and Orange Counties that encompasses San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. That investigation into the deaths, which included drug overdoses, suicides and homicides resulting from inmate violence, is ongoing.

In interviews, some experts said that the department’s deputies used too much force against Mr. Zumwalt given the circumstances, while others said that they seemed to follow department guidelines. But most experts said that they thought the deputies left him alone, unattended and without medical care for too long after the extraction.

John Burton, a lawyer representing Mr. Zumwalt’s family, said: “It starts with the fact that he was picked up for almost nothing. To use this amount of force, to extract him in the way they did, to allow him to die unmonitored — it’s appalling.”

Peter Williamson, another lawyer for the family, said Mr. Zumwalt had no serious criminal history.

“He wasn’t violent,” Mr. Williamson said. “In fact, he was calm during his arrest. How does a guy go from that situation to dead?”

Ron McAndrew, a jail consultant and former Florida prison warden, said that Mr. Zumwalt’s actions warranted mental health treatment, not violent extraction.

“In 40 years, I have never seen a team of 12 officers fully equipped with riot gear line up for one man,” Mr. McAndrew said. “I’d not only call this overkill, this is very punitive. They’re not there to punish anybody. They’re there to follow policy and procedure to maintain security and control. None of those things were done.”

Lawyers representing the department wrote in court filings that Mr. Zumwalt grew belligerent because of his drug use, and that he needed to be extracted from his cell to undergo a medical examination and complete the booking process.

The department’s lawyers confirmed the settlement amount but declined further comment.

The videos reviewed for this article were edited by the family’s lawyers for use in the civil case. The footage appears to be a continuous feed of the entire incident, but some parts were sped up and some portions of audio redacted. None of the depositions dispute the essence of the videos. The Sheriff’s Department sealed the raw footage when submitting it in the case, making it inaccessible to the public.

In the footage, Mr. Zumwalt appears calm as he enters the jail, the Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility in Banning, Calif., even as deputies find a small bag of meth in his pocket. He was placed in a sobering cell just before 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2020.

In the cell, a camera recorded Mr. Zumwalt pacing, shoeless and wearing only a pair of jeans. He hits the door a few times. He sits. Rises. He tries to dig into the bowl of a toilet, telling a deputy he’s searching for lost money. He takes off his jeans. One deputy tells him to stop kicking the door or he’ll hurt himself. He stops momentarily but otherwise doesn’t seem to respond.

Hours in a sobering cell

The department’s policy requires a medical evaluation within six hours of a person’s placement in a sobering cell. But that time can be extended in certain circumstances.

At around 9 p.m., Christine Odhiambo, a jail nurse, asks Mr. Zumwalt to submit to a medical evaluation. In a deposition, she said he refused and became confrontational. The interaction through the cell window was brief, and the door was never opened.

Ms. Odhiambo called a doctor, court records show, who extended Mr. Zumwalt’s stay in the sobering cell. Given the doctor’s order, it is unclear why the deputies felt an urgent need to remove him from the cell.

At 12:03 a.m. on Oct. 23, deputies arrive in riot gear and ask Mr. Zumwalt to lie on his stomach, the beginning of the confrontation that led to his death.

‘Please, I’ll die’

“If you do not comply with my commands, we’re going to have to use force against you,” one deputy says, according to the footage. “I do not want to do that.”

For the next three minutes, Mr. Zumwalt kneels in the back of the cell or paces without clothes, speaking incoherently if at all.

At 12:06 a.m., a deputy tosses into the cell an aerosol canister, which emits pepper spray. The chemical agent has an almost immediate effect: Mr. Zumwalt and some of the deputies can be heard coughing moments later.

Mr. Zumwalt, who is largely out of the camera’s frame, appears to kneel by the cell door as deputies continue to order him to get on his stomach.

At 12:09 a.m., a deputy sprays a two-second burst of the chemical agent into the cell. Mr. Zumwalt gets onto his stomach momentarily, before growing increasingly agitated, pacing and yelling.

“No, please, please, I’ll die, dude,” Mr. Zumwalt shouts during the chaos.

“You need to lay on your stomach, right by the door,” one deputy yells, adding: “Christopher, it’s going to get worse.”

At 12:11 a.m., a deputy throws a second pepper spray canister into the cell and continues to order him to get on his stomach.

At 12:13 a.m., a deputy throws a Stinger 15 grenade into the cell, which explodes with a flash, firing some 150 rubber pellets and tear gas.

“Go, go, go,” a deputy yells as he opens the cell door.

The extraction

A deputy carrying a stun shield, which emits an electrical current, leads the group in, and they pin Mr. Zumwalt into a corner of the cell. The confrontation that ends with Mr. Zumwalt in handcuffs cannot be seen clearly because the cell is filled with smoke from the grenade.

Mr. Zumwalt can be heard screaming in pain during three discrete Taser shocks. At least four deputies can be seen amid the smoke kneeling on or leaning over him.

“Stop resisting,” a deputy repeats.

“I can’t breathe,” Mr. Zumwalt yells in a gasp, among other pleas.

Some deputies said during depositions that he tried to bite them as they tried to handcuff him. Other deputies said they did not see any evidence or threat of biting.

At 12:19 a.m., 13 minutes after pepper spray began saturating the air in his cell, Mr. Zumwalt is wheeled out in a restraint chair. Blood is visible on the spit mask deputies put over his head. Mr. Zumwalt’s breathing appears labored, his eyes vacant and head hung loosely to the side.

He was taken to a safety cell, where, before closing the door, one deputy tapped him on the shoulder.

“You all right?” the deputy asked at 12:21 a.m. “Can you hear me?”

The deputy said in a deposition that Mr. Zumwalt “just groaned” in response.

None of the deputies noted that Mr. Zumwalt appeared to need medical attention after the extraction. Department policy required that he receive a medical evaluation and be continuously monitored while restrained in the safety cell.

Seven minutes alone

A deputy noticed he was unresponsive at 12:29 a.m. He was rushed to a hospital and resuscitated. But he was taken off life support and died on Oct. 25, 2020.

Some sheriff’s departments require trying alternative methods before ordering cell extractions, but Riverside is not among them. Sgt. Joel Grajeda said during a deposition that he ordered the extraction because Mr. Zumwalt refused to comply, and that no alternative tactics were required before he did so.

Sheriff Bianco did not comment on the timing of Mr. Zumwalt’s extraction or the fact that jail officials left him restrained and unmonitored in a safety cell for seven minutes after he was removed.

“Fighting with deputies, required to do their job, increased his already taxed circulatory system,” Sheriff Bianco said in the statement. “The settlement in this case is irrelevant and solely a business decision between attorneys, insurance companies, and risk management of the county. It in no way reflects on the facts of the case or points toward wrongdoing by deputies.”

Sheriff Bianco added that in deciding to settle, the department considered the ability of civil attorneys “to manipulate already anti-law-enforcement jurors with partial truths.” He did not provide any evidence to support his claim that civil juries are biased. And he did not say whether any of the deputies involved were found to have violated policy or whether any policies were changed after the incident.

In interviews, experts were divided over the decisions the deputies made.

Edward Obayashi, a deputy sheriff in Modoc County, in northeast California, who also trains correctional officers, acknowledged that at the start of Mr. Zumwalt’s extraction, “there is no immediate threat to anyone.” But, he said, deputies have a responsibility to maintain order in the jail, which may require the extraction of an inmate who does not pose a direct physical threat but refuses to follow orders. “You can’t allow disruption,” Mr. Obayashi said. “If it impacts the security of the jail, it can become contagious.”

Mr. McAndrew, the jail consultant, pointed out that departments often require extraction teams to include a mental health professional or a deputy trained in crisis intervention who talks to the person first.

“It’s ludicrous to think barking orders is going to get you any results in a situation like that,” Mr. McAndrew said.

Gary Raney, a former sheriff in Idaho and a corrections consultant, said deputies should have done more to de-escalate the situation.

Both Mr. Raney and Mr. McAndrew said that rubber pellet grenades are most often used for crowd control during riots or group fights — and that their use here was excessive and dangerous in the small cell.

Mr. Raney served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case, for which he wrote a 60-page report in which he found that the deputies violated department policy.

“One of the most disturbing things about this case is that the extraction did not need to occur, at least when it did,” he said. “There was no urgency, there was no harm occurring to Zumwalt, and they still had not exhausted verbal efforts to get him to comply.”

Natalie Reneau contributed video production.

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Uniform lines of black, brown, blue and green surrounded the “Safe in His Arms” memorial statue Wednesday evening, May 8, at the annual Riverside County Peace Officers’ Memorial Ceremony in Riverside.

Some in sharp jackets and hats and some still sweating from the 1.5 mile jog honoring the fallen officers of 2023, all there united in somber grief with the family, friends and community members still heartbroken and mourning.

This year, the names of Riverside County sheriff’s deputies Darnell Calhoun and Brett Harris, both who died in the line of duty, will be added to the memorial statue.

Calhoun, 30, was shot and killed on Jan. 13, 2023, while responding to a domestic violence call near Lake Elsinore. Harris, 27, died May 13, 2023, as a result of injuries suffered in a crash the previous day in San Jacinto.

District Attorney Mike Hestrin and Sheriff Chad Bianco addressed the crowd Wednesday evening, sharing words of reassurance and empathy.

Hestrin emphasized a solemn vow, “to keep their memory alive we must revisit these somber memories, but not dwell in sorrow, but to honor their courage and selflessness.” Bianco echoed the sentiment. He acknowledged the impact the loss had on the law enforcement community, “the pain that falls onto the family also falls onto their ‘work family.’ It is still very real for those in the line of work, we all lose a brother or sister when we lose someone in our profession.”

The ceremony included a tribute to all 75 Riverside County fallen law enforcement officials. Surviving family members solemnly read the names, while representing deputies and officers rose from their seats for each year.

A flag-folding ceremony and gun salute by the Riverside County Honor Guard marked the event’s conclusion. As two helicopters soared above downtown Riverside, the audience gazed upward, offering hope and remembrance for those who have fallen in the line of duty.

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Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco acknowledged being a dues-paying member of Oath Keepers during 2014, a group whose reputation is one of militant anti-government extremists.

However, Bianco is unapologetic and claims that he does not recall being part of the group but reported that he found an email from 2014 supporting his affiliation with the group.

“I found an email from 2014 where I joined for a year. I don’t even remember it,” says Chad Bianco

The existence of this unique sheriff’s membership, along with approximately 40,000 other Oath Keepers memberships, including current and former military and police personnel across the country, was exposed after hackers breached security and stole the information from the Oath Keepers website.

The members of this group, apparently, had an active and critical participation in the assault on the nation’s Capitol during the “Stop the Steal” rally, which occurred in January.

However, Bianco spoke in favor of Oath Keepers, stipulating that it is an organization that is in favor of the Constitution and freedom mislabeled by the FBI and the mainstream media. DDoSecrets (Distributed Denial of Secrets), a subversive whistleblower group founded in 2018, made the information available to the media.

Its members use swashbuckling nicknames like The Lorax and The Architect and secure web browsers so that information is spread anonymously. The group has been described as an offshoot of Wikileaks.

Bianco’s involvement was first made public Monday in a Tweet from JJ MacNab, a researcher and expert on extremist organizations at George Washington University who has been following Oath Keepers since its formation in 2009 and, more recently, the activities of Bianco. She said Bianco appeared on her radar when she heard him describe himself as “the last line of defense from tyrannical government overreach” on her podcast, RSO Roundup.

“When there are enough red flags, I start paying attention,” MacNab said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Was missing on Word file??

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Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco announced that he, his wife, and children tested positive for COVID.

It is unknown when Bianco tested positive but he wrote that his family has recovered after going through light symptoms.

“I held off the longest and wouldn’t have known other than I lost my sense of smell/taste,” Bianco wrote.

Bianco says he is working from home while quarantining.

Bianco is the second local leader to announce that they tested positive for coronavirus in the past week.

On Jan 20, Congressman Raul Ruiz confirmed he tested positive.

Ruiz has been providing updates on his Facebook page. Over the weekend, Ruiz reported having a low-grade fever and would’ve required hospitalization if his vitals had worsened. However, his condition has improved.

On Tuesday, Ruiz wrote that his fever had gone away and could potentially return to Riverside County on Wednesday if the fever doesn’t return.

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