San Diego County Paid $30 Million for Two Jail Deaths: Who Answers for the Next One?

San Diego County has paid about $30 million in two years to settle two wrongful-death lawsuits over deaths in its jails. Supervisors approved $16 million for the family of Hayden Schuck last October, believed to be the largest wrongful-death settlement in county history, after a $15 million settlement in 2024 over the death of Elisa Serna. 

What I could not find in public records is who inside county government answers for the next one.

Schuck was 22. He died March 16, 2022, at Central Jail, less than a week after an arrest on suspicion of drunken driving. The county failed to preserve 55 hours of surveillance footage from outside his cell. A federal judge sanctioned the county and ruled that jurors could assume the footage would have reflected badly on it, the Times of San Diego reported.

The Serna case followed a similar arc. Her 2019 death at the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility ended in an agreement of roughly $15 million, with the county paying $14 million and a contracted medical provider $1 million, per the same Union-Tribune analysis. Together, the two cases cost the county about $30 million.

The pattern is not new. A California State Auditor review counted 185 deaths in San Diego County jails from 2006 to 2020, the highest per-capita rate among the counties compared, the Associated Press reported. The auditor found that the Sheriff’s Department did not adequately assess inmates’ physical and mental health, and that the civilian oversight board skipped nearly a third of the deaths. San Diego’s settlements over those fifteen years totaled nearly $9 million. Two cases in two years have now cost more than three times that.

Where does the money come from? 

Payouts approved by the Board of Supervisors come from the county treasury, and the cost then feeds into the sheriff’s contribution to the county’s public-liability fund. County records cited by the San Diego Union-Tribune show that contribution growing from about $8.3 million in 2015-16 to nearly $50 million in 2025, according to a summary of that reporting. 

That is a fair point in the department’s favor, because some of the cost lands on its books. But a contribution formula is not a bill tied to specific failures. I found no public report that matches each settlement to what changed afterward.

That growth is about $42 million a year more than a decade ago. Every dollar of it competes with programs residents notice, such as senior meals, shelter beds and after-school care. I do not claim that any particular program was cut because of a settlement. The point is narrower: the county should be able to show taxpayers the tradeoff. As Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer put it when the Board expanded jail oversight in September, “the legal liability falls on the county as a whole, so this is a financial issue as well as a moral issue.”

Sheriff Kelly Martinez deserves a fair hearing. She says she was not in office for many of the deaths at issue, and her office points to added medical staff, updated intake screening and new review roles to flag in-custody deaths faster. The numbers moved in the right direction: deaths peaked at 19 in 2022, fell to 13 in 2023 and nine in 2024, and stood at eight in 2025 as of September, according to Corrections1. 

Bookings have risen and more people arrive with serious medical and behavioral-health needs, which makes the work harder. Credit is due. So is context: jail deaths since 2006 now exceed 250.

Oversight is catching up slowly. On September 9, the Board voted 4-1 to let the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board investigate jail medical staff and contractors, whose conduct it previously could not fully review. In three years the board dismissed at least 75 allegations against health care providers for lack of jurisdiction. Its findings remain advisory. 

An independent study of just over twelve years of in-custody deaths across seven facilities was published in April and scheduled for a public meeting on May 7. I did not find a public county response to its recommendations.

Los Angeles shows where an unexamined pattern leads. LA Public Press found that LAPD misconduct has cost the city $384 million since September 2019 across nearly 2,000 claims, paid from the general fund. 

City Controller Kenneth Mejia called liability payouts “a major reason that the City is in a fiscal emergency.” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez says the payouts leave less money for services such as sidewalks and street lights. LA County requires a corrective action plan for sheriff settlements over $100,000. Hernandez says similar reports on police cases have not reached the council.

San Diego can avoid that path with three steps that need no new law. First, publish an annual settlement report by department that lists the amount, the category of claim and what changed afterward. Second, require a corrective action plan for every settlement above $100,000 before the Board votes, as Los Angeles County already does for its sheriff. Third, show the tradeoff in the budget: during hearings, the Board should state how liability contributions and reserves compare with the programs competing for the same dollars.

Families who lose a relative in custody deserve accountability, and taxpayers deserve a ledger. A settlement closes a lawsuit. It should not close the question of what went wrong, or who is responsible for fixing it.