In a letter sent last week, advocates Yusef Miller and Paloma Serna of Saving Lives in Custody California urged the Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board to “take action to preserve critical video and audio evidence while investigating allegations of misconduct by Sheriff’s employees and contractors.”
When a person dies or is seriously injured in jail, the advocates specifically want CLERB to identify all nearby cameras and request video from them, along with all evidence of intercom calls from cells — among other recommendations.
The advocates’ letter to the panel, which investigates complaints against the county sheriff’s and probation offices, comes after a recent ruling in the lawsuit over the death of Hayden Schuck, who died at 22 after several days in a holding cell at the downtown Central Jail in 2022.
On July 29, U.S. Magistrate Judge Allison Goddard found San Diego County failed to preserve essential surveillance video footage potentially related to Schuck’s death — 57 hours of footage from a camera pointing at a hallway leading to Schuck’s cell were erased, in a failure the judge called “shocking.”
“Such video from the hallway leading to Mr. Schuck’s holding cell would have shown whether deputies were conducting timely and adequate safety checks and whether medical staff were providing care to Mr. Schuck,” the advocates said in their letter.
Sheriff’s Office policy requires surveillance footage of “critical incidents” to be kept for at least two years. But a deposition from a Sheriff’s Office official referenced in the letter revealed many deputies are unaware of the policy — leading to automatic overwrites of footage once the agency’s general data retention threshold is reached, due to technology update requirements.
The Central Jail usually begins to overwrite such data after about nine months, due to tech. But in the Schuck case, even though two requests for video preservation were made within that time frame, the footage was still not preserved.
Paul Parker, who stepped down last year as CLERB executive officer, said the issue isn’t a new one. At a past board meeting before he left, he said, it was brought up that “the facilities were retaining videos for varying lengths of time, and many times not the two years” required in critical incidents.
The impact of the failures is not limited to Schuck’s case, the advocates say in their letter.
The problem has also affected the ongoing lawsuit over the death of Omar Moreno Arroyo, whose case closely resembles Schuck’s.
And it has affected the case of Joey Frias, who experienced “unreasonable force and restraints” from deputies while still suffering from the immediate aftermath of a seizure, and the case of Frankie Greer, who faced a delay in being given medical aid after suffering a seizure, falling off the top bunk and smashing his head on the concrete floor below, as his cellmates called for help.
In Arroyo’s case, the advocates’ letter says “a federal judge determined the Sheriff’s Office had no obligation to preserve the hallway video because Mr. Moreno’s surviving wife, Tammy Wilson, did not notify the Sheriff’s Office that inadequate safety checks were an issue in her case.”
Wilson only became aware of the deficient safety checks due to evidence found by her attorneys months after she filed a lawsuit, when it was too late, they wrote.
Attorney Grace Jun, whose law firm represents a number of the families, says that more than half of the cases she and other attorneys see have some piece of audio or video evidence missing — making it harder to get accountability.
“The problem with deaths in jail is they happen behind closed doors and locked facilities, where people have no access. It’s not like public members can have — whip out their cell phones and start video recording,” Jun said. “So we’re completely dependent on the sheriff’s department to give us information.”
The letter points out that families are expected to identify and preserve crucial evidence after people die or are seriously injured in jail, even though the Sheriff’s Office frequently denies their public records requests for it.
“These families have no idea what happened, and there’s no information coming out about how their loved ones died,” Jun added. “They have no way to be like, ‘Hey, I need that video from the hallway,’ because they don’t even know where their loved one was, which hallway, where, what floor, which jail — they don’t know.”
To remedy this, the letter urges CLERB to locate where in the jail the incarcerated person was housed and where the incident occurred, identify all cameras in the area — including hallways — and ask the Sheriff’s Office to preserve relevant video for 72 hours in all in-custody death cases, and to specify these locations in their investigative reports.
The letter also urges CLERB to request all evidence of intercom calls from cells. If the calls aren’t being recorded, the board should request “all documents and notes indicating when deputies are receiving intercom calls requesting assistance,” the letter adds.
Lastly, in cases involving body-worn camera video, families want CLERB investigators to identify all the deputies involved — not just the primary deputies — and also request and get footage from them to ensure thorough investigations.
“This is so critical to preserve this video evidence, because the transparency is lost and evasive,” Miller said. “We need to know exactly, step by step, what happened — not some summary of someone’s account, not some true or false statement of someone else, exactly what is seen on video.”
It’s now up to CLERB to decide whether to make the recommended requests to the Sheriff’s Office.
CLERB’s executive officer, Brett Kalina, said the board received the letter Thursday, and it will most likely be addressed in open session at the next meeting on Sept. 4.
The letter to CLERB marks the coalition’s latest effort in an ongoing campaign for jail reform through rallies, meetings, letters and participation in the board’s monthly meetings.
Ahead of CLERB’s Thursday meeting, advocates and family members of people who died in jail gathered just outside San Diego County offices near the “Guardian of Water” statue to detail their struggles to get accountability and transparency from the Sheriff’s Office.
“This group of activists and advocates for jail change has come here together to say that we are sick and tired of the loss of life that is done from callous and neglect,” said Miller, who leads the North County Equity and Justice Coalition and who founded the Saving Lives in Custody campaign with Serna after her daughter Elisa Serna died in jail in 2019.
They were joined by surviving relatives of Saxon Rodriguez, Matthew Settles, Linda Bagby, Callen Lines and Vianna Granillo. “Our families just grow from the next announcement that we have that there’s an in-custody death,” Miller added.
Seven people have died in San Diego County jails this year — the latest an 82-year-old man who other incarcerated men say was ignored for days and allowed to decline in administrative segregation.
At this pace, Miller noted, by year end the number will likely reach 12, up from last year’s total of nine.
“We’re going in the wrong direction, and we implore the sheriff’s department to make changes and to implement those changes so that we can have people survive in custody,” he added.
Parker said the CLERB is an advocate not for a group of people or for the department, but for improving the practices of the San Diego County Sheriff’s and Probation offices.
“If something reasonable comes up, make the recommendation,” Parker said.
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