San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
4 COUNTY JAIL DEATHS IN 4 WEEKS REVIVE CONCERNS
Sheriff’s Department has been questioned about care of inmates
Four inmates have died in San Diego County jails since mid-october, bringing the number of deaths this year to nine and reviving questions about what is being done to prevent deaths inside local jails.
Before the recent spike, the county was on track to record the fewest jail deaths since Sheriff Bill Gore took over the department in 2009, although the inmate population has been sharply reduced due to the pandemic. Last year 16 people died in custody.
The fatalities come as the Sheriff’s Department continues to press ahead with plans to outsource all of its health care services to a for-profit company. The department currently relies on a mix of county health workers and private contractors for that work.
The latest deaths also come as the department struggles to contain mounting cases of COVID-19. So far, more than 300 inmates and staff have been infected by the virus, and last month a behavioral health counselor at the Las Colinas women’s jail died.
None of the inmate deaths have been linked to the pandemic, according to the Sheriff’s Department, which also said the counselor’s death was not related to her job.
All four of the men who died over the past month had a history of mental illness. Three had recently been ordered into a state hospital or jail-based competency program, court records show.
Lt. Ricardo Lopez, a spokesman for Gore, did not respond to questions about the latest in-custody deaths or what the department is doing to prevent future fatalities.
County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher said there have been too many deaths in San Diego jails and something needs to change.
“I am greatly concerned about the current system and the levels of care and outcomes we are seeing in our correctional system,” he said. “I don’t believe we are meeting the need and am convinced that a fundamentally new approach is necessary.”
Gore’s command staff last year stopped announcing deaths in the county’s seven jails. But records obtained by The San Diego Union-tribune under the California Public Records Act confirm the four fatalities since mid-october.
According to those documents, which are required to be filed with the California Department of Justice, Kevin Lamar Mills, 58, died at a hospital on Nov. 11. His father said deputies found him in distress alone in his cell.
Mills had been arrested on suspicion of assault in July, and his attorney requested a psychiatric evaluation the following month to determine if Mills was mentally competent to stand trial, records show. Mills had not been convicted of the charges.
His father, AC Mills of Skyline, visited his son at the Central Jail in August and was taken aback by his demeanor.
“Kevin has a history of mental illness but he has a medication that controls that,” AC Mills said in a phone interview last week.
“When I saw him, he was totally out of sorts. I want to know about the medication he was getting” in jail.
Mills said a sheriff ’s lieutenant called in the middle of the night to tell him his son had died.
“They woke us up at 3:30 in the morning and said he was dead,” Mills said. “I was shocked. My wife just went to pieces. They had no answers. At that point, they said they had gone into an investigation into the cause of death and [the case] was sealed.”
Mills said an emergencyroom physician later told him that they couldn’t restart his son’s heart.
‘Mental instability’
Sheriff’s records also show that Omar Younes Hasenin passed away Nov. 3; Nathan Lee Brogan died Oct. 17; and Anthony Chon perished Oct. 16. Chon is also known as Anthony Chom in court records.
The documents do not state the causes or locations of death. The Sheriff’s Department regularly seals documents related to in-custody deaths — and requests the Medical Examiner’s Office do the same.
But court records and other public documents provide some details about the deceased inmates.
Brogan, for example, was arrested in 2018 on attempted murder and other charges after allegedly shooting a San Diego city utility worker named Lecarter Washington as he was restoring water service to Brogan’s home in University Heights.
Washington survived the shotgun blast; Brogan, who was 81, was found incompetent to stand trial.
After the attack, investigators seized an AR-15, 34 additional rifles, 21 handguns and 75,000 rounds of ammunition from Brogan’s house.
A civil lawsuit Washington filed against Brogan and unnamed family members in September argued that Brogan should not have been able to stockpile so many dangerous weapons due to his history of mental illness.
“Defendants knew, or reasonably should have known, that allowing Brogan to maintain a firearm in the residence with such mental instability would be a danger to Brogan and others,” the complaint states.
Hasenin, 41, racked up more than a dozen criminal arrests over the past decade, almost all of them misdemeanors. His pattern of behavior prompted his attorney to seek a psychiatric evaluation in 2016, court records show.
He was arrested again Sept. 4 after entering an occupied building with the intent to commit burglary, the District Attorney’s Office said. He was awaiting trial when he died.
Chon, who died about two weeks before his 44th birthday, also was the subject of a county mentalhealth proceeding.
That case was filed in March, weeks after he was suspected of deliberately setting fire to property on two separate dates in February.
Chon was facing five felony arson counts when he died at an undisclosed hospital last month.
History of deaths
The spate of in-custody deaths — a total of five since last month, when Adam Terrance Rogers was found unresponsive on the floor of his Vista jail cell Oct. 7 — is among the largest clusters of fatalities in a short period of time in the 10-plus years since Gore was elected sheriff.
Other fatalities this year include a suicide, a homicide and an overdose — all manners of death that experts said are preventable with closer monitoring and intervention.
Between 2009 and 2019, the Sheriff ’s Department reported more than 140 inmate deaths, according to a sixmonth investigation published by the Union-tribune last fall.
The investigation found that San Diego County jails had the highest mortality rate among California’s largest counties. Many of those fatalities also could have been prevented with more effective treatment, experts and plaintiffs’ lawyers have said.
In the 10-year period ending in 2019, the county recorded an annual average of 245 deaths per 100,000 inmates. Government statisticians rely on the 100,000 standard to compare different-sized jails and compare jails with the nonjail population.
Los Angeles County had the second-highest rate, an annual average of 157 deaths per 100,000 inmates. Sacramento County had the lowest mortality rate among the six counties studied, with an average of just under 94 deaths per 100,000 inmates a year.
Gore has disputed this death rate methodology, which is the same formula used by state and federal governments to calculate mortality rates among incarcerated people. He has said his jails are not outliers, in part because they serve a different population than other jails.
The Sheriff’s Department also noted that it had boosted spending on inmate health care in recent years and has adopted policies aimed at preventing suicides and other deaths in its jails.
The deaths do more than claim lives unnecessarily. The Union-tribune investigation found they have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal settlements and jury awards. Lawsuits continue to be filed against the county by relatives of deceased inmates.
Privatizing jail health care
The recent spike in inmate fatalities also comes as Gore completes a plan to fully privatize inmate medical and mental health services — a plan county health workers say is likely to lead to more injuries, serious illness and deaths.
“It’s full steam ahead right now,” said Jennifer Alonso, a mental health clinician, about Gore’s outsourcing plan. Alonso attended a lunch-hour protest opposing the plan outside the men’s central jail downtown late last month. “I feel for the inmates.”
County nurses and counselors have complained for years that their medical and mental-health recommendations are too often overruled by Sheriff’s Department personnel.
Fletcher said outsourcing public health services is a change in the wrong direction.
“A presently bad system will get fundamentally worse if we move forward with a private, for-profit corporation seeking to squeeze every ounce of profit they can out of our system,” the county supervisor said.
Instead, Fletcher recommends turning jail medical and mental health services over to the county’s public health professionals, saying that would improve the level of care and promote better outcomes once inmates are released.
“If we want to break the cycle of poverty, addiction and incarceration, we need to rethink our approach,” he said.
The sheriff sought and received permission from the Board of Supervisors to request bids from private contractors to manage inmate health care. Fletcher was the sole vote against the proposal.
Earlier this month, the Union-tribune reported that Gore engaged in multiple meetings and other communications with executives from Wellpath, one of the nation’s largest providers of correctional health care. The company has a history of lawsuits alleging lapses in correctional health care.
Gore and other department officials declined to discuss the meetings and emails, which began months before the sheriff publicly announced his plan to privatize the last of the county-delivered medical care in his jails.
A Wellpath executive said company officials have had conversations with San Diego County dating back years, and they are always careful to observe rules prohibiting such contact once the bidding process has been announced.