By Christopher Damien Christopher Damien is reporting about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. Alicia Upton paced the concrete floor of her jail cell. She looked around the cramped quarters.
Then she pressed the alert button on an intercom attached to the wall. “What is your emergency?” responded a voice, captured on video footage from a camera in the cell. It was a deputy about 50 feet away, in the control room of the women’s mental health unit where Upton, 21, was being held.
“It’s not an emergency, but —” she began, then the deputy cut off the call before she could finish. Charged with a misdemeanor, Upton was awaiting a court-ordered evaluation to determine whether she was competent to stand trial. She took a few more listless steps, the video shows.
She paused beneath a buzzing fluorescent light, then picked up a white bedsheet and said, “It’s time to hang myself.” She was found, limp, 20 minutes later. In the interim, the camera recorded the young woman preparing to end her life.
But no guards, who were tasked with monitoring the video feed, noticed until it was too late. Upton was the first of 19 detainees at Riverside County jails to die in 2022. That total, the highest the department had reported in at least three decades, ranked the jail system among the most lethal in the nation that year.
The deaths, attributed to homicide, overdose, natural.
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