Coronavirus outbreak spreads in California’s San Quentin prison

LOS ANGELES — With about a third of San Quentin’s inmates now infected with the coronavirus after a transfer of prisoners from a Southern California correctional facility overrun by the illness, Marin County officials revealed Monday that a death row inmate found dead last week in his cell tested positive for COVID-19.

Richard Stitely’s death was the first in California’s oldest and most notorious prison, where 1,059 inmates and 102 correctional and medical staff have tested positive for the virus.

The Marin County prison has surpassed the California Institution for Men in Chino as the most infected prison in the state.

Marin County’s hospitals have been inundated with intensive care patients from the prison. On Monday, 22 inmates were being treated at the county’s hospitals, officials said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state was coming up with a plan that included “using Seton Hospital, one of our alternative care facility sites” in Daly City to treat the inmates.

“San Quentin: So that is our deep area of focus and concern right now,” Newsom said Monday.

Stitely had been on death row for nearly three decades since being sentenced for the 1990 rape and murder of Carol Unger, 47, who was last seen leaving a Reseda bar with him.

He was one of 725 death row inmates housed at the Bay Area prison. Of those, nearly 200 have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Stitely’s official cause of death is still pending additional investigation, according to Marin County sheriff-coroner’s officials.

Unlike other prisons in California, San Quentin had escaped any coronavirus outbreak until early June. But 121 inmates were moved from the Chino prison to San Quentin on May 30.

The California Institution for Men, an early hotbed of coronavirus cases in the state’s prison system, has reported the deaths of 16 inmates. Statewide, 22 inmates have died of virus-related illnesses and more than 4,800 have tested positive.

Inmates in Chino who did not test positive and are medically vulnerable were transferred to other prisons, including San Quentin and Corcoran. The transfers ignited outbreaks at both prisons, with a federal judge calling the moves a significant failure.