Apparent Suicide at Santa Barbara County Jail to Get State Review

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating how 41-year-old inmate Cecilia Michelle Covarrubias managed to hang herself on November 13 while being held in a single-person observation cell located within eyeshot of the Inmate Reception Center in the county’s Main Jail on Calle Real. Due to a new state law, the investigation will be overseen by the state.

Covarrubias, a Santa Ynez Valley resident, had been booked the day before on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, evading a peace officer, and wanton disregard for safety of others and was being held on $75,000 bail. What the actual facts are have yet to be finalized, but initial reports suggest Covarrubias had been under the influence of fentanyl at the time of her arrest and deputies felt compelled to administer Narcan to prevent a possible overdose. 

Some jailhouse watchers question whether Covarrubias was physically able to have caused the mayhem with which she’s been accused. Others — like Aaron Fischer with the nonprofit watchdog group Disability Rights, which actively monitors conditions in the county jail as part of its long-running and partially settled civil rights litigation against the facility — have expressed deep concern. 

“That someone could have committed suicide in an observation cell, a place where they put people who are at risk of harming themselves, sends alarm bells through my head,” Fischer said.

Fischer stressed he had not read Covarrubias’s death reports yet, but said that as of July 2023, the county committed itself to removing the structural supports in jail observation cells that could be used by inmates to commit suicide. “There are certain tie-off points,” he noted, “that need to be removed. Clearly, that hasn’t happened yet.”

The record, Fischer added, is murky. He said it appears from county documents that the county claims it eliminated access points on the observation cell’s ceiling from which inmates might hang themselves.

Covarrubias’s death comes months after recent reports by the Santa Barbara Grand Jury concluded the levels of staffing by both correctional deputies and the private medical professionals in the county jail are less than they should be and are called for. In response, the Board of Supervisors authorized the sheriff earlier this year to expand the number of private health-care employees working at the county jail. Given the difficulty in hiring medical workers anywhere, let alone in correctional facilities, it’s unclear to what extent those hirings have occurred and what impact, if any, that decision might have made in preventing Covarrubias’s death. 

Regardless, Covarrubias is the first inmate death in Santa Barbara County since a new state law went into effect this summer requiring that locally conducted investigations of inmate deaths be screened by a state agency, the Board of State and Community Corrections, otherwise known as BSCC. Although this agency has existed in some form since 1944, the state legislature voted last year to reconstitute its powers and responsibilities; it is now charged with reviewing the deaths taking place in county jails. 

Justifying this new level of state oversight over what’s traditionally been a county responsibility, the bill’s author cited the “disproportionate” number of deaths taking place in county jails. While the BSCC will not be conducting its own independent investigations of each death, it has been authorized to hire the medical personnel necessary to review the adequacy of the investigations conducted by local law enforcement officials. Likewise, the board is authorized to make operational recommendations to reduce the likelihood of future jail deaths. 

Under the terms the new law — authored by State Senator Toni Atkins and supported by both of Santa Barbara’s legislative representatives in Sacramento, Gregg Hart and Monique Limón — local law enforcement officials will be required to respond to such recommendations, detailing how they intend to comply or explaining in some detail why they will not. 

The new law makes public for the first time the investigative documents of jail death investigations. Some redactions are allowed. 

To date, the new board has not conduced any such reviews, having only just appointed a director and its first medical personnel.