Inmate who died in Riverside jail had been charged with killing his cellmate in 2021
A man who died at a jail in Riverside this week had been charged with killing his cellmate at Riverside County's jail in Indio two years earlier.
Luke Hanchette, 44, was accused of murder, suspected of beating his 48-year-old cellmate, John Leo Hemmer, to death with a crutch, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department reported.
Deputies found Hemmer suffering major traumatic injuries while doing a routine cell check around 7:45 a.m. on July 21, 2021. Hanchette was charged with murder days later. He had pleaded not-guilty and was scheduled to appear in court in January.
The sheriff's department reported Wednesday night that Hanchette was found unresponsive in a housing unit cell around 7 a.m. that day. The department is investigating the death and said there were no signs of foul play.
Hanchette is the 11th person to die in custody this year, the first since a man was found unresponsive in the Banning jail's intake area on Nov. 4.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's department is in the throes of a jail death epidemic that stretches back at least to the time of Hemmer's death in 2021. The county's five jails have a daily population of about 3,500 people, and have reported about seven deaths a year since 2005, the earliest records that are publicly available. In 2020, 12 people died; 2021, nine. And in 2022, 19 people died in the county's custody, the most ever reported.
Until Hemmer's death, the county had reported 10 homicides resulting from violence among inmates between 1985 and 2017, averaging to about one every three years. Hemmer was the only incarcerated person suspected to have died at the hand of another inmate in 2021. And since his death, two men were charged with killing cellmates in 2022 and one this year, all at the Cois Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta.
Micky Payne is accused of killing his cellmate, Mark Spratt on Jan. 12, 2023. Erik Martinez is accused of killing Ulyses Munoz Ayala on Sept 29, 2022. And Ronald Sanchez pleaded guilty to the Sept. 6, 2022, murder of his cellmate Kaushal Niroula, a transgender inmate whose family has sued the department over its decision to house the two together.
But many of the recent deaths remain under investigation with no confirmed cause of death certified by the department. And the integrity of the department's data on inmate deaths has been called into question. The Desert Sun reported last year that the department failed to report several deaths to the California Department of Justice. And when the department did, it reported inaccurate information.
And most recently, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to consider separating the Coroner's Office, which investigates and certifies causes of deaths of all inmates, from the sheriff's department, which has managed it since 1999. The move earlier this month came after relatives of the deceased repeatedly urged the board to do so, saying the department could not investigate its own in-custody deaths impartially.
Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Riverside inmate who died had been charged with killing his cellmate
