This week’s report about yet another death at a county jail run by the Sheriff’s Department was painfully familiar in its portrait of cruel indifference to the health of inmates and the overt signs the agency isn’t being truthful about key events in the tragedy. It detailed how Jose Cervantes Conejo, 43, died while in a coma after suffering brutal injuries at the Vista jail following his arrest for alleged public intoxication. While a sheriff’s deputy insisted the injuries resulted after he rolled off a bench and hit his head, a neurosurgeon at Palomar Medical Center said the skull fracture, broken eye socket and multiple brain hemorrhages suffered by Cervantes Conejo were “not compatible with a simple fall.”
His wife, Maritza Benitez, has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that her husband was wronged both by Escondido police — which had the option of taking him to a medical facility instead of jail — and by the Sheriff’s Department, where he allegedly wasn’t treated under the usual protocols for those suffering from alcohol withdrawal and suffered his brutal injuries within hours after being booked.
If these allegations are corroborated, expect the total of public funds paid to families harmed by Sheriff’s Department negligence or misconduct — at least $75 million since 2019 — to keep mushrooming. What has already been corroborated is that department callousness and indifference — from the top on down — played a role in many of the more than 200 jail deaths since 2006. No wonder the department has ignored a state law enacted in 2023 in response to its lethal history that requires sheriff’s departments to release far more information related to deaths in county jails.
Which brings us to county supervisors. Because of their power over Sheriff Kelly Martinez’s budget, they appear to be the only people in California with any leverage to force her to demand change in an institutional culture that treats jail deaths not as failures to learn from but as liabilities to obscure. Unfortunately, this ugly history — and the immense toll it ends up taking on taxpayers — has generated perfunctory complaints at most from Terra Lawson-Remer, Monica Montgomery Steppe, Jim Desmond and Joel Anderson. It’s clear the supervisors have ed Sheriff Martinez in realizing that jail deaths don’t generate much public outrage — even as costly lawsuits keep piling up.
If only the board would follow the suggestion of local attorney Brody McBride and require that the multimillions in settlements and jury awards be taken out of the sheriff’s budget. “Once that happens, you will see the Sheriff’s Department handle the rest on their own, very quickly,” he predicted last summer.
That’s just the sort of smart reform one would expect in a well-run county. But, alas, not this one.
