by Douglas Ankney

On June 18, 2024, the United States Court for the Northern District of California approved a series of settlements totaling $1 million that resolved a civil rights suit brought by the survivors of Carlos Chavez, whose suicide at the Monterey County Jail (MCJ) they blamed on guard negligence and substandard healthcare. Wellpath, LLC, the contracted private healthcare provider at the jail, agreed to pay another undisclosed amount.

According to the complaint, Chavez, 39, surrendered for a relatively minor probation on April 18, 2022. After he purportedly tried to hang himself, he was placed in an observation cell. There he managed to suffocate himself, jailers said, by stuffing his mouth and throat with toilet paper. Jail guards were accused of failing to conduct wellness checks required every 15 minutes, missing at least seven before discovering Chavez’s dead body on April 20, 2022—just two days after he turned himself in.

His wife, Annabel Chavez, disputed that his death was suicide. She said that Chavez had no motive to kill himself and arranged for a second autopsy, which discovered bruising on his neck indicative of strangulation. She also noted that “corrections officials have found suicide by tissue to be highly unusual.” She further contended publicly that Chavez was murdered either by “long-ago gang rivals or rogue sheriff’s deputies.”

On April 28, 2023, she and five children that she shared with the deceased filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1988, alleging eight causes of action for his wrongful death that were violations of the federal constitution and state law. Accused were the County of Monterey and its Sheriff, Steven Bernal, as well as James Bass, Chief Deputy of Corrections Bureau in the County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO); John Thornburg, Chief Deputy of MCSO’s Enforcement Bureau; Ray Tongol, MCSO Jail Operations Commander; Jail Deputy Martinez (first name unknown); Wellpath; its psychiatrist Paul Francisco, MD., nurse Sean Tavares, RN., and mental health therapist Amanda Briseno, LMFT.

According to the complaint, “Wellpath has a history of providing inadequate care, including mental health care,” to detainees and prisoners in “394 county jails and community facilities and more 140 state and federal prisons in approximately 36 states” where the company holds contracts. Plaintiffs alleged that this inadequate care included a failure to maintain “proper medications on hand to administer detainees”; failing to provide “proper wellness checks”; “signing off on medical paperwork without seeing a patient or adequately assessing a patient”; and ignoring pleas from detainees “for medical and mental healthcare,” including ignoring signs and symptoms of “distress in mental health patients.”

The result of Wellpath’s inadequate care, the complaint continued, had been “deaths of numerous inmates, including several suicide deaths.” The obvious underlying problem, the complaint added, was that the firm sought “profits over providing adequate healthcare,” since the more services that Wellpath provided, the less revenue it retained as profit. As such, “Wellpath operated in a manner that inhibited the ability” of detainees and prisoners—including Chavez— “to receive adequate healthcare,” the complaint concluded.

Less than a year after the suit was filed, the parties entered negotiations that resulted in their settlement agreement. That included fees for Plaintiffs’ attorneys, Jamie G. Goldstein and Elise R. Sanguinetti of Arias, Sanguinetti, Wang & Torrijos, LLP in Emeryville. See: Chavez v. Cty. of Monterey, USDC (N.D. Cal.), Case No. 3:23-cv-01878.

Wellpath corporate predecessor California Forensic Medical Group (CFMG) was first contracted to provide healthcare at MCJ in 1984. As far back as 2007, a consulting firm warned that detainee healthcare was “inadequate and result[ed] in substantial risk of serious harm,” the complaint recalled; a second assessment in 2011 reached the same conclusion. A 2014-2017 Monterey County Civil Grand Jury investigation also “found consistent problems that resulted in risk of serious harm to people in the Jail,” including “frequently missed or skipped” wellness checks and “mental health issues … still not being addressed.”

In granting an April 2015 injunction in a class-action suit, the Court “found substantial evidence that the Jail’s system of medical and mental health care was Constitutionally deficient,” the Chavez complaint noted, and “subjected people with existing medical and mental health conditions in its custody at risk of serious harm, including self-harm.” The injunction in that suit required the County and CFMG/Wellpath to remedy 44 identified violations. See: Hernandez v. Cty. of Monterey, 110 F. Supp. 3d 929 (N.D. Cal. 2015).

But remedial plans, formalized in a 2015 settlement agreement, apparently failed; as PLN reported, the Court found Wellpath in contempt of the agreement in September 2023 and vowed to sanction the firm $25,000 for each of the 43 provisions it continued to violate if they weren’t remedied. [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p.52.]

The Chavez suit is one of four filed over jail deaths that the County reportedly settled in July 2024. The estate of Matthew Medina was paid $875,000, and the estate of Carlos Patino Regalado settled for $500,000; both were also represented by Goldstein and Sanguinetti. See: Medina v. Monterey Cty., USDC (N.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:24-cv-00053; and Patino v. Cty. of Monterey, USDC (N.D. Cal.), Case No. 5:22-cv—01564.

The survivors of Antonio “Neno” Billante were paid another $2 million, according to their Berkeley attorney, Aaron Fischer. PLN has requested documentation of those payouts and will update details as they are available.  

Additional source: Voices of Monterey Bay

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