Inmate dies at Riverside County jail; cause unclear, but no signs of foul play

A man died Sunday afternoon while being held at the county jail in Riverside, with the cause still under investigation but no signs of foul play, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said.

Deputies were conducting a security check around 2 p.m. Sunday when they found an unresponsive man in a cell, according to the sheriff's department. Custody and jail medical staff immediately tried life-saving measures, but paramedics from the Riverside Fire Department pronounced him dead at 2:30 p.m.

The man's identity has not been released. The sheriff's department said in a statement that "no further information is available at this time" due to an ongoing investigation.

The man's death in the Robert Presley Detention Center comes after a record-breaking year in 2022, when 18 inmates died in the county's jails, the most of any year according to public data going back more than a decade. From 2005 to the 2021, the county averaged seven inmate deaths a year.

The incident Sunday was the second in-custody death reported by the sheriff's department so far this year. In mid-January, the department reported a man was killed by a fellow inmate at the Riverside County jail in Murrieta.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Inmate dies at Riverside County jail; no signs of foul play