Oklahoma County jail has sixth inmate death of 2022
Another Oklahoma County jail inmate died Monday, the sixth so far this year.
Dustin Levi Revas, 26, was declared dead at the jail at 2:12 a.m. Monday after a detention officer found him unresponsive on a bunk in his cell.
The jail announced the death Tuesday in a news release.
A cellmate reported Revas had been throwing up but refused to call for medical attention. The detention officer reported speaking briefly to Revas during a routine site check Sunday evening, according to the news release.
Investigators were looking into the possibility of a drug overdose, among other things, the jail's director of communications confirmed.
Like many other lockdown facilities across the county, the Oklahoma County jail is facing a fentanyl problem. The drug is easy to smuggle in and often deadly.
“Fentanyl is something that really we have ... been exposed to, and we have found more and more frequently at the jail,” the jail's administrator, Greg Williams, told the jail trust March 7. "For every overdose that we have at the jail that doesn’t survive, we have 10 to 12 that do survive. So it gives us an opportunity to talk to them and kind of figure out where they got the drug or why they took it it or some of the circumstances around that.
"A lot of the survivors that we interview had no idea they were taking fentanyl. ... We save a lot more lives than we lose with overdoses."
Revas was jailed March 23 on a misdemeanor charge of larceny of merchandise from a retailer. He was accused of shoplifting two televisions from a Walmart in Edmond in 2020. Edmond police at the time reported he lived in Midwest City.
Jail staff immediately began life-saving measures after he was found unresponsive Monday morning during a site check, according to the jail's news release. "EMSA paramedics and Oklahoma City Fire personnel arrived and continued those efforts, but they were not successful in reviving the detainee."
Also dealing with drug issues is the Canadian County jail in El Reno. An inmate there was charged March 16 with first-degree murder after another inmate died of a drug overdose.
Cydnei Tysha Mitchell, 31, of Oklahoma City, is accused of smuggling in the drugs that caused the death this month of Kristina Marie Franz.
Mitchell was caught March 5 in the jail with a bluish powder in a plastic bag hidden in her pants cuff, a sheriff's lieutenant reported. She was serving weekends at the jail for exploitation of the elderly.
Franz, a murder defendant, was 29.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma County jail inmate dies, marks sixth death of 2022
