by Matt Clarke

When detainee Reynaldo Ramos, 55, was found unresponsive in his Robert Pressley Detention Center cell in California’s Riverside County on April 16, 2024, efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he was pronounced dead. He had been arrested on drug trafficking charges 10 days earlier. The County Sheriff’s Department (RCSD) has issued no cause of death. But Sheriff Chad Bianco and his department have been under fire since jail deaths spiked in 2022. Though critics have complained for years of racism, excessive use of force and unconstitutional conditions of confinement at the County jail system, it was only in February 2023—after the spate of deaths began—that state Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) launched an investigation by the California Department of Justice (CDOJ) .

Bianco was an RCSD lieutenant without a lot of management experience when he successfully challenged two-­­term former Sheriff—and fellow Republican—Stan Sniff in 2018.

Reelected in 2022, Bianco aligns politically with extreme right-­­wing reactionaries. He is a former member of the Oath Keepers, which the FBI describes as an “anti-­­government militia.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist groups in the U.S., said that the Oath Keepers “trained for revolution against the state”—training put to frightening use on January 6, 2021, when group members took leading roles in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, 58, received an 18-­­year federal prison sentence in May 2023 after his conviction on charges of seditious conspiracy for his role in the insurrection. For their parts in the attack, 13 other Oath Keepers were given prison sentences, as well. Bianco defends the Oath Keepers, blaming the Capitol attack on “a few fringe people” and proclaiming that it is “not really what they stand for.”

“They certainly don’t promote violence and government overthrow,” he declared, apparently ignoring Rhodes’ conviction for doing precisely that. Despite attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from the administration of former Pres. Donald J. Trump, Jr. (R), group members “stand for protecting the Constitution,” he insisted. The SPLC begs to differ. It describes the Oath Keepers as “one of the largest far-­right antigovernment groups” with “a long history of engaging in and promoting their own form of vigilante justice.”

Yet Bianco declared that he is “not ashamed” of his past membership in the Oath Keepers. He did not voluntarily disclose the information, though; his affiliation with the group came to light only after a massive data breach resulted in Oath Keepers membership rolls and emails being posted online by the nonprofit data transparency group, Distributed Denial of Secrets. Bianco’s past membership was then publicly outed in a tweet by J.J. Mac Nab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Bianco further downplayed his joining the militia, saying, “I found an email from 2014 where I joined for a year. I don’t even remember it. It was an email saying ‘Thank you for joining.’ I paid a year’s membership.” But why downplay what you aren’t ashamed of?

Bianco is also a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a controversial group founded in 2011 whose member sheriffs embrace a discredited reading of the U.S. Constitution to proclaim authority superseding that of state and federal government officials. Though this theory has been thoroughly debunked—there is nothing in the Constitution granting a sheriff the option not to enforce laws he or she deems unconstitutional—CSPOA rode right-­wing blowback to COVID-­19 masking and social distancing mandates and now claims its membership includes nearly 10% of the nation’s 3,000-­plus sheriffs.

Bianco was all-­in on not enforcing the COVID-­19 shut-­down order issued on April 4, 2020, by the county’ s public health director, Dr. Cameron Kaiser. Despite acknowledging it “is a valid order and enforceable by fine, imprisonment or both,” Bianco declared that his deputies would not be enforcing it.

Bianco’s COVID-­19 stance likely cost lives, including those of his own jail deputies, at least two of whom perished from the disease while the jail system suffered one of the largest outbreaks of COVID-­19 among all California jails. Worse, when advocates asked him to release medically vulnerable detainees from the jail, he took to the RCSD Facebook page to mock the request. Even as the disease ravaged detainees and staff alike, Bianco doubled down at an April 2020 press briefing, when he cruelly declared: “If you don’t want to catch this virus while you’re in custody, don’t break the law.” Did the Sheriff forget how many detainees were incarcerated for being too mentally ill or too poor to make bail?

Maybe. But Bianco was definitely not transparent about how many people died of COVID-­19 in his custody. Autopsy reports were delayed and disclosed only grudgingly. Since one of the many hats Bianco wears is that of county Coroner, the death toll may never be fully known. What we do know is that those detained in the jails said they were “denied soap, cleaning supplies, masks, clean clothes, phone access, regular showers, [COVID-­19] tests, and lifesaving medications and medical care,” as 1,000 of them tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. This continued even after RCSD was fined close to $18,000 by California’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration for serious violations of state COVID-­19 regulations.

According to Executive Director Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors and researches extremist groups, Bianco is one of many sheriffs who “use the far-­right ‘constitutional sheriff mythology’ to paper over law enforcement abuses of power.” That’s fine with many on the political right, including its “nerve center” in the Claremont Institute, which presented its 2023 Sheriff Award to Bianco during a $450-­a-­plate dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Huntington Beach. The group’s “efforts to elevate far-­right sheriffs like Bianco continue a trend that started during the pandemic: the mainstreaming of the ‘constitutional sheriff’s’ mythology,” Burghart added. Like Bianco, the Claremont Institute is enjoying a moment for its embrace of former Pres. Trump, with senior fellow John Eastman among 18 people indicted along with the former president in a Georgia prosecution for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Though he’s been in office less than six years, Bianco is no lightweight among California sheriffs. Holding the offices of Sheriff, Coroner, and public Administrator in the state’s fourth most populous county—and tenth most populous in the nation—he supervises over 4,200 employees, who provide services not only to the county but also to 17 cities within its borders that contract with RCSD. His responsibilities include a jail system with five lockups, as well as a half-­dozen court buildings, a civil bureau, the Coroner’s Bureau, the Public Administrator’s Office and 12 deputy patrol stations. RCSD’s annual budget exceeds $1 billion, about one-­eighth of the county’s total budget.

Allegations of RCSD Mismanagement

But while the Claremont Institute was honoring Bianco for his Christian Nationalist ideology, the reviews closer to home were less sanguine. The Press-­Enterprise, the newspaper of record in Riverside County, described Bianco’s administration as a “complete disaster” in an October 2023 editorial that cited “a long string of incidents involving deputies, and lawsuits arising from a wave of deaths in custody in the county’s jail system.”

Just in 2022, county jails counted 18 deaths of incarcerated people. That’s the highest number of deaths in the system since 2005, and nine more people died in custody in the first 10 months of 2023. The number also represents a deviation far from the norm. Between 2005 and 2021, there were 120 deaths in the Riverside County jail system, an average of just seven per year. Previously, the record high was 12 deaths, and that happened only twice, once in 2015 and again in 2020, during the height of the COVID-­19 pandemic.

Not only did Bianco downplay the jail deaths—implying that detainees deserved and should expect to catch COVID-­19—he also dismissively pointed out that the majority of deaths were from suicide or fentanyl overdoses. He further shirked responsibility for jail murders.

“The bottom line with homicides, if somebody is going to kill someone in jail, and they choose to follow through with a murder, that person is responsible,” Bianco declared, “not the deputies or the Sheriff’s Office.”

This all implies that Bianco and RCSD take little responsibility for tragic in-­custody deaths. It’s ironic for a sheriff who claims to venerate the Constitution that his office comes with a constitutional duty to provide for the safety of the people he incarcerates, be it protection from themselves, others, or the influx of drugs into the jail. It is a failure to perform that duty, for example, when detainees are misclassified, housing a transgender woman in the same cell with a violent sex offender. Or when detainees known to be at risk for suicide are not properly monitored. Or when the fact that the jails are flooded with fentanyl is ignored.

With regards to the latter, Bianco made the somewhat absurd claim that people were getting themselves arrested just to smuggle drugs into the jails. Even were that true, people being booked into jails are searched for such contraband. However, such wild speculation isn’t needed to find the most likely route that fentanyl takes into county jails: Deputies working as guards.

As PLN reported, Dep. Jorge Oceguera-­Rocha, 25, was off-­duty from Riverside County’s Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility on September 17, 2023, when he was pulled over by police who found 104 pounds of fentanyl in his car; that amount is sufficient for an astonishing 10 million doses, according to federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents, who launched a months-­long investigation that resulted in the April 2024 indictment of 15 people allegedly associated with the powerful Mexican drug cartel formerly run by “el Chapo.” [See: PLN, May 2024, p.10.]

The DEA said that its “Operation Bling” also netted 376 pounds of methamphetamine and 1.4 kilograms of cocaine. Would the Sheriff really have us believe people were getting themselves arrested to smuggle drugs into the jail after a jail guard was nabbed with a huge amount of fentanyl and his associates were found with large amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine? Maybe that’s the real reason so many detainees are fatally overdosing, and the reason why their survivors are filing lawsuits blaming the jail and RCSD.

Oceguera-­Rocha wasn’t the only Riverside County jail guard arrested in September 2023. Dep. Brent Bishop Turnwall, 22, was on-­duty when he was found high in his car by fellow RCSD deputies guarding the Cois M. Byrd Detention Center on September 13, 2023. He was jailed on suspicion of being under the influence of and in possession of an illegal drug while working as a guard at the jail. He and Kristi Ann Turnwall, 52 (their relationship was unclear) were charged with selling Adderall and “magic mushrooms” at the lockup.

On September 15, 2023, two days after Dep. Turnwall’s arrest, a fellow deputy working with jail detainees in the county’s alternative sentencing program, Christian Heidecker, 32, was arrested and charged with extorting money and sex from female inmates—including the sexual assault of one. Worse, attorneys for the women said a jail guard sergeant and a county attorney offered $1,000 to buy their silence. Pleading guilty to extortion, witness intimidation and bribery, Heidecker agreed to a five-­year prison sentence on February 6, 2024. A county spokesperson swatted away questions about the payoff attempt, saying “it is not uncommon to seek settlement prior to litigation to avoid the time and expense for both sides associated with lawsuits.”

Questionable Legal Ethics

But that wasn’t the only example of questionable ethics involving RCSD. Bianco has balked at releasing records on jail deaths, delaying when forced to do so, and he also apparently falsified some of the documents he did release; almost all of those who died at the jail were listed as “convicted” on reports sent to CDOJ, then they were in fact all pretrial detainees who had not been convicted of the crimes they were charged with. Fudging their conviction status put their deaths in a different category, lowering the scrutiny given them. Bianco also failed to meet the state’s 10-­day reporting deadline for many of the deaths, often missing it by months; several of the deaths investigated by the Desert Sun revealed other possible inconsistencies in reporting. There were also delays in notifying families of the deceased that their loved one had died and what caused the death.

Of the 18 County jail deaths in 2022, five were due to drug overdoses, two were suicides, two were homicides and one was determined to be an accident. The others were chalked up to “natural causes.” All left behind grieving families, a half dozen of whom have filed lawsuits against Bianco and RCSD.

For Kathy Nigro, the lack of information about the death of her 20-­year-­old son, Michael Antonio Francisco Vasquez, is excruciating. RCSD said that he died of a suspected fentanyl overdose, but officials refused to explain how the drugs got into the jail or whether deputies gave him emergency care. They also made her wait a week to reclaim the body, telling her it first had to be released by the coroner’s office. Except Bianco is the coroner; did it take a week for him to release the body to himself?

RCSD also took a week to notify the family of Mario Solis, 31, after his in-­custody death on September 3, 2022, one they were told was due to a suspected fentanyl overdose. But just two weeks later, jail guard Oceguera-­Rocha was busted with over 100 pounds of fentanyl, a suspicious coincidence not lost on the grieving survivors.

These lapses prompted widespread calls to strip Bianco of coroner’s office control. But the county Board of Supervisors voted down the idea on March 12, 2024, after a report from County CEO Jeff Van Wagenen that it would be too expensive. However, he allowed that those who died in custody of RCSD should not be autopsied by Bianco. The Board then voted to outsource those investigations to neighboring county coroners.

People who knew another dead detainee, Kaushal Niroula, call the circumstances of his in-­custody murder on September 6, 2022, both troubling and puzzling. The 41-­year-­old was awaiting retrial on murder charges that had incarcerated him since 2009, when he was one of five men charged with the preying upon the romantic hopes of wealthy Palm Springs retiree Clifford Lambert, 74, before robbing him and murdering him in his home. Lambert’s remains were not found for nine years and not identified for another three after that, but the five were convicted on the confession of hitman Craig McCarthy, also 41.

Niroula’s conviction was overturned by the state Court of Appeal after it found that then-­Superior Court Judge David Downing made inappropriate comments at trial about Niroula, who was a transgender woman far enough along in the transition to have developed breasts and also HIV-­positive. But Niroula also raised on appeal allegations that his confidential and privileged communications with his attorney, both in-­person and on-­the-­phone, had been recorded and shared by jail staff at RCSD. Enrique Tira, a private investigator who worked on Niroula’s case, claimed there was ample evidence of the improper interception and recording of privileged communications by jailers.

“We were given audio tapes that were intercepted, that were clearly [covered by] attorney-­client privilege,” said Tira. “We know they were listening to him, they monitored his phone calls like no one else.”

Rodney Ronald Sanchez, 61, Niroula’s cellmate, was charged with his murder. He had previously been convicted of rape and was awaiting trial on 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault of a minor at the time. Surveillance video showed Sanchez “high-­fiving” other detainees and accepting their handshakes after murdering Niroula. He confessed, pleaded guilty at arraignment and was sentenced to 75 years to life on September 19, 2022.

“The big question,” said Daniel Garcia, one of Niroula’s co-­defendants, “is why was the Riverside Sheriff’s Department housing a LGBTQ inmate with a known sex offender with a violent history?” Niroula’s parents filed a lawsuit against RCSD on August 2, 2023, alleging that he lay dead in his cell for over an hour before guards realized it. They are represented by Los Angeles attorney Christian M. Contreras. See: Est. of Niroula v. Riverside Cty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:23-­cv-­01739.

Mark Spratt, 24, Ulysses Munoz Ayala, 39, and Justin Kail, 31, all died at the county’s Southwest Detention Center in French Valley. Spratt was brutally beaten and thrown over the second-­tier railing onto the floor below on January 12, 2023, allegedly by cellmate Mickey Rodney Payne, then 34. RCSD described the murder as racially motivated because Payne complained on the phone about being housed with Spratt because the latter was a White man. Payne was charged with murder and misdemeanor battery on a peace officer in connection with the fatal assault. Spratt’s family has also filed a lawsuit against RCSD in connection with his death, represented by attorney Brynna D. Popka of McCune Law Group in Ontario. See: Est. of Spratt v. Cty. of Riverside, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:23-­cv-­02096.

Ayala was awaiting sentencing in two assault cases when he was allegedly murdered by another detainee, Erik Martinez, then 30, during an altercation on September 29, 2022. Martinez was awaiting trial for a 2021 murder and carjacking at the time of the fatal assault. Ayala’s daughter, Dezarae Munoz, filed a lawsuit blaming her father’s death on a lack of security and supervision at the jail. She is represented by Los Angeles attorney Lewis G. Kashan. See: Munoz v. Bianco, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:23-­cv-­02063.

Kail died of a fentanyl overdose on May 7, 2022. He had been in the jail since February 11, 2022, awaiting trial for selling a fatal dose of the drug to Ernie Gutierrez, who died in August 2021. Kail’s mother, Sharon Kidd, filed a lawsuit alleging that RCSD should have known that detainees like her son were consuming fentanyl “at an alarming rate which would cause death.” She is also represented by attorney Kashan. See: Kidd v. Bianco, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:23-­cv-­02072.

Just days before Kail’s death, Alicia Upton, 21, killed herself at Robert Pressley Detention Center, drawing attention to alleged lapses in mental health care for RCSD jail detainees. Upton was arrested on April 19, 2022, after allegedly threatening a woman; at booking into the jail, she admitted during mental health screening, “I always kinda wanted to die.” Yet for reasons that remain opaque, she was removed from a “safety” cell five days later. Another four days after that, on April 28, 2022, she fatally hanged herself with bed sheets.

More recently, in December 2023, the county paid $7.5 million to the survivors of jail detainee Christopher Zumwalt, 39, who was never even arrested before deputies threw him in a cell to sleep off meth he admitted using when they stopped him in October 2020. They then engaged in a brutal effort to extract him from the cell, allegedly for a medical evaluation that was never provided before he died, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Aug. 2024, p.9.] Though not one of those from the spate in 2022, his death nevertheless underscores how dangerous county jails can be, especially for medically or mentally vulnerable people like Zumwalt or Upton.

Still More Legal Problems for RCSD

It is not only murders, overdoses and suicides which have plagued Riverside County jails. RCSD has been operating since 2015 under a court-­approved consent decree in a suit filed over lack of proper medical and mental health care. Yet it continues to have problems delivering even minimal medical care to detainees, according to a lawsuit filed by the family of Richard Matus, Jr., 29, a detainee who perished on August 11, 2022, after suffering a medical emergency that guards at the county’s Southwest Detention Center in Murrieta allegedly ignored until it was too late to save him. Matus was one of the pretrial detainees who, following in-­custody deaths, were inaccurately listed as “sentenced” in documentation provided to CDOJ.

The Civil Grand Jury, the county’s oversight agency for RCSD, has put out eight investigative reports since 2014 concerning conduct, operations and mismanagement of RCSD and county jails. These reports have included recommendations from run-­of-­the-­mill—such as increasing the frequency that detainee laundry is washed to twice weekly—to more complex issues, including implementation of a system to backup video surveillance recordings and revision of visitation areas and policies to exceed minimum standards set by the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC). However, none of these proposed improvements has been adopted, either by former Sheriff Sniff or now by Bianco.

Unsurprisingly, county jails are not the only area in which RCSD falls short. In a flub reminiscent of Keystone Cops, deputies let a drug dealer walk away with 60 pounds of methamphetamine that they supplied for a 2023 undercover sting operation gone awry. That was enough meth to make 7,680 standard 1/8-­ounce (“8-­ball”) doses of the illicit drug.

“After the transaction, the suspect drove away and deputies from the Gang Task Force attempted a vehicle stop,” RCSD declared. But the suspect “failed to yield, and a pursuit was initiated.” Deputies then “lost sight of the vehicle” due to the pursuit’s “high speeds” as well as “the suspect’s disregard for public safety.” By their own admission, RCSD deputies endangered the public twice during this operation: Once by putting 7,680 doses of meth on the streets, and again by initiating a dangerous high-­speed pursuit of a desperate suspect.

In August 2022, the county reportedly paid $136,000 to an elderly couple terrorized at their home by deputies conducting a botched drug raid the year before. RCSD had no warrant for the August 2021 search. Nothing illegal was discovered, either—just a pair of terrified retirees awakened in the middle of the night when the door to their house was smashed and gun-­waving deputies flooded in. Alex Coolman, an attorney representing Chen-­Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband Jiun-­Tsong Wu, 75, said that RCSD deputies suspected the couple’s low electricity consumption indicated they were stealing power to grow pot. See: Hwang v. Olguin, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:22-­cv-­00424.

Despite so many RCSD failings, Bianco won his most recent re-­election in June 2022 with over 60% of the vote. The county even built a new $376 million, 1,626-­bed jail; the massive 600,000-­square-­foot John J. Benoit Detention Center was completed almost two years behind schedule in 2020, and the county then waited almost two years more before opening it because the rest of the county jail system was 10% under-­utilized.

Reactionary politics have a long history in the Inland Empire, of which the county is a part; that name recognized “the KKK’s claim to the region,” extending the white supremacist group’s efforts to “characterize inland Southern California as a symbolic white refuge,” according to University of Southern California human geography researcher Juan De Lara. As a result, the Inland Empire “had one of the highest concentrations of hate groups in the country, approximately one dozen.”

Bianco’s critics claim his administration perpetuates a version of the same racist ideology. Although it is currently politically risky to make openly racist statements, Bianco isn’t timid about delivering the same sentiment in code—asking why, for example, the FBI designated his Oath Keepers an anti-­government militia but not Black Lives Matter or Antifa, or blaming crime and economic woes on undocumented immigrants. However, this has frightening real-­world consequences for minorities living in Riverside County.

The region’s population is now 48% Hispanic, yet law enforcement has made those residents “feel like illegitimate citizens,” Prof. De Lara said. He pointed to Bianco’s use of RCSD “to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants” in county jails as an example of the way “local political leaders used a hyper racialized law-­and-­order narrative to implement policies that target the [Hispanic] population.” The professor noted that Black citizens are similarly targeted “disproportionately” by RCSD, accounting in 2015 for 13.1% of all arrests in the county despite making up just 6% of its population.

The situation is so dire that, in 2020, the county’s Board of Supervisors unanimously declared racism a public health crisis in the county and vowed to take action to deal with the issue, including systemic racism in the RCSD. Yet the Board then also approved an $83.9 million increase in the RCSD budget for Fiscal Year 2020-­21, after it had already built the unneeded new jail facility. This can only bode ill for attempts at reducing mass incarceration; as history shows, if you build a jail cell, a sheriff will fill it—taking a heavy toll on the health and civil rights of those inside.

All eyes in Riverside County are now on Bonta’s ongoing investigation of RCSD. Meanwhile supporters are talking up Bianco as a candidate for the GOP nomination in the 2026 race to replace term-­limited Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).  

Sources: The Guardian, KABC, KESQ, LAist, Mercury News, NBC News, NPR News, Palm Springs Desert Sun, Palm Springs Tribune, Reason, Riverside Press Enterprise Rolling Stone, San Bernardino Sun, Spectrum News, Texas Metro News

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