With $1 million in inmate's death, San Diego County's payouts hit $14 million in a year

Before he was served a meal in a plastic bag and left unmonitored in his San Diego County jail cell, Ivan Ortiz told guards he was feeling depressed and hearing voices telling him to kill himself, his family said in a lawsuit.

But he pulled the plastic bag over his head and suffocated himself. He died later that day from a brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen, according to a medical examiner’s report.Ortiz was the fourth person to die in a San Diego jail in 2019 and was one of more than 150 people to die in Sheriff’s Department custody since 2009.

Sheriff’s spokesperson Lt. Amber Baggs said via email that the department reviewed critical incidents, including jail deaths, with an eye to improvement. Department officials have previously stated that they work constantly to protect people incarcerated in county jails. They say they have increased spending and staffing in the jail medical units to improve healthcare.Brody McBride, an attorney representing Ortiz’s family, said the young man’s death was “totally and completely preventable.”Less than a year before Ortiz’s death, the county paid consultant Lindsay Hayes $25,000 to assess the Sheriff’s Department’s suicide prevention policies.

He was hospitalized after the December 2018 attempt and then placed into the jail’s psychiatric unit. After the March 2019 attempt, he was moved into a single-person “enhanced observation” cell and given the tear-proof gown and blanket.“The use of isolation not only escalates the inmate’s sense of alienation, but also further serves to remove the individual from proper staff supervision,” he wrote.

The county review board, which investigates all in-custody deaths, found that jail staff “failed to keep a suicidal inmate safe from self-harm.”” a special report by the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2019 that examined the mortality rate in county jails, finding that San Diego’s is the highest among California’s largest counties.

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