Why is Riverside County so secretive about jail deaths?

Imagine your two sons are in jail. They have not been convicted of a crime.

They are awaiting trial in an attempted murder and robbery case. They have been there for nearly four years, as COVID and other factors grind the already slow wheels of the U.S. justice system to a near halt.

Then one Thursday, one of your sons calls to tell you the other has mysteriously died behind bars.

You call the jail repeatedly for answers, but get none. Four days later, on Sunday, you go to the jail, and they tell you to go to the coroner’s office to do some paperwork. That’s it.

No official reached out to you to tell you the news. You don’t know the cause of death. And you get the runaround trying to get all of his belongings back, including paperwork important to his case. It could be highly relevant to your other son’s defense.

Lisa Matus doesn’t need to imagine this nightmare. She’s living it.

As The Desert Sun’s Christopher Damien reported recently, Matus wants answers from Sheriff Chad Bianco about the Aug. 11 death of her son, Richard Matus Jr., 29.

Matus deserves those answers. It’s basic human decency.

But the public deserves answers too. Yet again, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is failing to be transparent about key issues.

Already, at least nine people have died in Riverside County jails this year, including one just this Thursday. That’s equal to the number for all of last year, according to data provided by the California Department of Justice.

The Desert Sun requested coroner's reports and other information about the deaths in the jails this year from the sheriff's department. The department declined those requests, saying the investigations of the deaths are confidential even after the open investigations are completed. It has not released the names of any of those who died, nor their causes of death.

The sheriff’s department hasn’t even released Matus’ name publicly — The Desert Sun found out his identity through its own reporting.

Does the sheriff’s department have something to hide?

This is not how it works in other counties. Consider this example from neighboring San Bernardino County just this week:

On Aug. 23, a 67-year-old man named Kenneth Wolfe was arrested for disobeying a court order and was taken to the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga. There, he had a medical emergency, deputies and jail staff tried giving him CPR, but he died. An autopsy is pending. The public was informed of all those details less than 48 hours after Wolfe’s death via a press release.

Or how about in San Diego County? There, Sheriff’s officials pledged in April 2021 to announce jail deaths within 24 hours.

San Diego used to have the same kind of lags plaguing Riverside County. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, department officials used to wait months to publicly announce in-custody deaths until complete autopsy results and internal Sheriff’s Department investigations were finalized.

But that changed, thanks in part to work by the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, the volunteer civilian oversight panel that investigates complaints about misconduct by the county Sheriff’s Department and Probation Department.

The department promised to publicly disclose jail deaths soon after they occur following complaints from family members and their advocates who had been kept in the dark as sheriff’s officials completed their months-long investigations.

Bianco has long resisted any kind of oversight board. And he’s resisted other types of accountability as well.

For example, in July, County Auditor-Controller Paul Angulo blasted the department, sayingit had refused to let the county's internal watchdog review how it processes civilian complaints and made millions of dollars of purchases in ways that violated county purchasing oversight policies.

Angulo put out a report on these problems. The audit was conducted from Jan. 21, 2022, through June 9, 2022, and analyzed the department's operations between July 2020 and May 2022.

The audit focused on the department's management of its complaint process, purchasing processes, cash accounts, armory room inventory and software access.

Angulo said he was stunned by the sheriff's department's lack of cooperation with what he described as a procedural internal controls audit.

"They are behaving like a private militia," Angulo said of the sheriff's department, in an interview with The Desert Sun. "You say you're transparent? Well, show us."

Bianco and his spokespeople did not return The Desert Sun's requests for comment on the audit.

Bianco seems to believe his recent re-election gives him carte blanche. But that’s not how our system works — or should work. It’s our tax dollars funding those jails and this sheriff’s department.

Who is dying in Riverside County jails? Why are they dying?

Why is it taking years for cases to come to trial? If this man had had a speedy trial, and had been acquitted, this death would not have happened.  There is blame to go around in several areas of our local judicial system.

Angulo deserves answers. Matus deserves answers.

Every resident of Riverside County deserves better. No other family should have to live this nightmare.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Why is Riverside County so secretive about jail deaths?