In a fiercely detailed report, the Santa Barbara County Grand Jury excoriated the medical care provided in the county jails, blaming the failure to follow established medical protocol combined with repeated failures of communication for the deaths of three jail inmates this past year. One of the deaths involved the suicide by an openly suicidal 41-year-old woman with a history of psychotic disorders who had been placed in an observation cell within eyeshot of the inmate reception desk and managed to hang herself with a 12-inch telephone cord.
Another of the deaths involved a 40-year-old Spanish-speaking man with a history of homelessness and alcoholism who fell on his head while having an alcohol-withdrawal-related seizure while in custody.
And the other involved a 57-year-old Lompoc woman — identified in the report only as CF, also with a history of mental illness — who died after screaming in pain repeatedly for nearly two days while in the Northern Branch Jail because of what would later be revealed to be an infection of her stomach lining that burned a hole through her stomach. In her case, medical professionals in the jail incorrectly believed the woman to be experiencing opioid withdrawals because she regularly took painkillers to deal with chronic lower back pain. Had any of the jail medical professionals evaluated the woman for her pain, the grand jury concluded, they might have saved her.