AFTER JAIL DEATHS, SOME FAMILIES GET LATE NOTIFICATION, NO CAUSE
Most Calif. counties disclose deaths within 24 hours
Omar Moreno Arroyo was acting strangely on the morning of Jan. 7. He was drilling holes in the wall of the Julian cabin he shared with his wife, and he was convinced someone else was in the house.
“He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who I was or what was going on,” said Arroyo’s wife, Tammy Wilson. “He just wasn’t there. He wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital.”
Wilson called the police, a decision she would regret.
San Diego sheriff ’s deputies arrived within minutes. They handcuffed Arroyo for his own protection — and theirs. They led him to the front porch and searched the cabin, where they found a pipe used for smoking methamphetamine but nothing else illegal, his widow said.
Arroyo, 34, was arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of drugs and possessing drug paraphernalia.
Wilson told deputies about her husband’s heart condition and gave them his prescription medication so he would not miss it while in custody. But he died in a holding cell at the Men’s Central Jail later that night.
Two-plus months have passed since Arroyo became the first San Diego County jail inmate to die in custody this year. Despite repeated calls to the Sheriff ’s Department and Medical Examiner’s Office, Wilson said she still has no idea how her husband died.
The Sheriff’s Department has requested that the case be sealed during its investigation, and the coroner’s office complied.
Wilson is the latest of dozens of family members who have had to wait months to learn what caused the death of their loved ones behind bars.
It is a black hole of unknowingness that families say makes a horrible ordeal even worse.
Wilson said she is racked with guilt over her decision to call 911 and is seething with frustration over a system that appears more committed to minimizing liability than addressing possible lapses in treatment for inmates.
“The look on his face is what haunts me,” she said about the last time she saw her husband. “He looked terrified.”
A Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the lack of information provided to Wilson and other survivors in the aftermath of in-custody deaths. She also said she was unable to discuss the Arroyo case because it remains active.
“This is an ongoing investigation, so I do not have any information to provide at this time,” Lt. Amber Baggs said by email. “Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
The Medical Examiner’s Office said police and sheriff ’s officials are permitted under state law to request that investigative findings be withheld from the public while cases remain under review.
“Law enforcement agencies typically make this request if they believe the public release of the information contained in these reports would seriously hamper the successful resolution of the investigation,” spokesman Donnie Ryan said in a statement.
Other counties disclose
Whenever an inmate dies in San Diego County jail, the Sheriff’s Department is required to follow specific protocols.
The deaths are reported to the commander on duty, who also informs senior leaders in the department. Cases are referred to the sheriff’s homicide unit, which operates independently from the jails; witnesses are interviewed and evidence is supposed to be preserved.
The Medical Examiner’s Office takes possession of the body and conducts its own investigation. Generally autopsies are completed within a day or two, although the full report is not released until homicide detectives close their case.
The Sheriff’s Department does not immediately announce in-custody deaths. Gore stopped regularly announcing inmate deaths two years ago, when The San Diego Union-Tribune began investigating the county’s jail-mortality rate.
Instead, the department waits to complete its internal investigations before issuing a press release — often months afterward.
Other California sheriff ’s departments announce jail deaths within 24 hours. In recent months, sheriffs in San Francisco, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Riverside and Contra Costa counties all alerted the public hours after inmates died on their watch.
State law requires county sheriffs to report in-custody deaths to the Department of Justice. The Union-Tribune regularly requests those documents under the California Public Records Act and reports the deaths as the forms are disclosed.
When Kevin Lamar Mills passed away in sheriff ’s custody in November, his parents wondered for weeks what happened to their 59year-old son. They were informed of the death in a 3:30 a.m. phone call from the Sheriff’s Department but given no details.
“They said they checked at 10 or 11 and he was all right,” said AC Mills, the deceased man’s father. “Then they said they did a random check at 2 o’clock in the morning. They went in there, and they found him in a medically distressed condition. “What that means, I don’t know,” the elder Mills said. “They didn’t bother to explain that.”
The sheriff’s investigation into Mills’ death took two and half months. The department announced the death Jan. 27.
“The Medical Examiner concluded an autopsy and completed their reports,” the news release said. “They determined the cause of death to be hypertensive cardiovascular disease. The manner of death was determined to be natural.”
AC Mills doesn’t think there was anything natural about his son’s death. He said his son never had a heart condition. Mills also said he never got a straight answer from the Sheriff’s Department to his questions.
“I have a lot of suspicion,” the father said. “I don’t think they did a thorough investigation. All the jockeying around and telling me different stuff. They are kind of misleading me.”
‘I felt violated’
It took nearly a full day for Mary Rogers to learn that her son died in sheriff ’s custody last fall. A deputy called her on the afternoon of Oct. 8 — about 20 hours after Adam Terrance Rogers was found dead in his Vista jail cell.
For weeks the family was told the case was sealed and officials could not discuss what happened.
In December, the Sheriff’s Department issued a press release announcing Rogers’ death and highlighting his drug charges and the medical examiner’s finding that the death was accidental.
Mary Rogers said they found out about the press release on social media later that night.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I felt violated that as a family we weren’t notified before the public.”
After a botched notification process following a 2013 death in custody, the Sheriff ’s Department promised to do better.
David Inge, 54, died in the Vista jail that August — one day after being booked into custody on an outstanding warrant.
When Inge’s girlfriend did not hear from him, she called the jail. A sheriff’s captain told her that Inge had been released — he didn’t tell her that it was to the Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.
It took the family nine days of calling hospitals, rehabs, even state prison before someone at the jail finally told Inge’s daughter that her father had died.
When confronted by NBC 7, the Sheriff’s Department pledged to improve the way it communicates with inmates’ relatives.
“The circumstances of this incident … have made us realize we can do things better and owe it to the public to review our practices when we are contacted by family and friends of inmates shortly after they have passed away,” a department official said.
Since then, several family members have told the Union-Tribune troubling stories about how they were notified about a loved one’s death.
Jose Sevilla died in the Central Jail in 2019. His cousin, Cesar Garcia, said the family did not know where Sevilla was for two days. Sevilla, 39, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and struggled to care for himself; the family worried something terrible had happened.
A Medical Examiner’s Office employee left a business card at the door of Sevilla’s parents’ house, but it was a door the family rarely used. Sevilla’s father found the card two days later, Garcia said.
When the family called the number on the card, they were told the case was sealed.
The Sheriff’s Department may have reason to limit the amount of information released about inmate deaths, said Julia Yoo, an attorney who has sued the county multiple times over deaths and injuries in custody.
“There may be a perfectly legitimate basis to do this for the integrity of the investigation,” she said.
“But how are they justifying this shroud of secrecy when the cause and manner of death have no bearing on who, if anyone, committed a misconduct? The families have a right to know and the right to grieve.”
If relatives want to pursue legal action against the county, they must file a notice of claim within six months of the death. But they first need to have a basis for that claim, and no information means no basis, Yoo said.
“Often the families have no idea how their loved ones died. Even worse, sometimes they are told outright lies about what happened, denying them access to justice,” she said. “The sheriff can’t torment families just because they want to run out the clock and in hopes that the community will just forget about a person who died.”
Waited for hours
Moreno Arroyo was a Mexican national, having been brought into the United States when he was 2 years old. As a DACA kid, he was eligible for legal residency under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, his widow said.
Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, the Consul General of Mexico, has intervened to try to help Wilson find out how her husband died and whether he received the heart medication he needed to survive.
“We want to make sure due process is followed when Mexican nationals are detained,” Gutierrez said in an interview. “That is our job.”
The Consul General of Mexico sent a letter to the Sheriff’s Department on Feb. 1, asking several questions about the arrest and detention.
Under international protocols, the department is supposed to notify the embassy whenever foreign nationals are arrested or die in custody. Gutierrez said Gore did not respond to the letter.
For her part, Wilson said she just wants to know what happened inside that holding cell.
On the day her husband died, she finished her work shift and quickly checked the sheriff ’s website. It said he was due to be released, so she drove to San Diego and waited at the jail.
About 11 p.m. she said a jail worker told her Arroyo had not yet been processed. Six hours later, a man approached her and told her he had died the night before.
Wilson slowly digested what she just heard. She said she shudders at the thought that her husband was alive when she arrived to pick him up, hours and hours earlier.
“I asked if I could see him but they wouldn’t let me,” she said. “He wouldn’t give me any information. He gave me a business card. He gave me a little pamphlet on how to pick a mortuary and basically that was it.”