Inmate, 19, Apparently Hangs Self in Jail Cell

A 19-year-old inmate considered a suicide risk apparently hanged himself in a psychiatric observation cell at the Orange County Jail early Tuesday, authorities said.

Paul Allen Pinkerton, who last January escaped from Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, was to appear in Juvenile Court Tuesday for sentencing on a burglary charge to which he pleaded guilty, according to one of his attorneys.

“He hung himself in the bathroom area,” Jim Enright, assistant district attorney said. “Apparently, at this point it (appears to be) a suicide unless we learn something else.”

Authorities said Pinkerton was found by the jail’s medical staff at 1:15 a.m. hanging from a noose fashioned from bedsheets and tied to an overhead bathroom drain pipe.

Paramedics summoned to the jail declared Pinkerton dead at the scene.

Enright’s office is investigating the death, the first inside the jail this year. Orange County supervisors voted May 14 to have the district attorney perform the coroner’s role in deaths involving deputies or those that occur in the jail, run by Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates. The action was designed to remove potential conflicts of interest that could occur when Gates’ staff investigates deaths involving his employees.

According to Enright, police investigators and his attorneys, Pinkerton was an emotionally troubled man who had a history of criminal arrests and was potentially suicidal.

“In the past, he was on (prescribed) medication,” said Glen Osajima, one of his attorneys. “(His mental illness) was self-diagnosed; he thought he had mental problems. I don’t think anyone is really surprised that this happened.”

“He needed some kind of medication,” said attorney Gary Proctor, who represented Pinkerton in the juvenile case. “The recommendation in the past has been that he needed psychopharmacological management, but I don’t know what it was . . . . We thought he was suicidal and we thought he had some severe mental problems.”

Enright said one of two medical facility staff members on duty had checked Pinkerton at 1 a.m. and found him lying on his bunk.

11 Others in Cell

Eleven other inmates under psychiatric scrutiny--one of them a murder defendant--were in the cell at the time of the hanging, Enright said.

It was not known, Enright said, whether the hanging was seen by the others, some of whom may have been sleeping out of sight of the bathroom area. Pinkerton’s cellmates were being questioned late Tuesday, Enright said.

Lt. Dick Olson, a sheriff’s spokesman, and Enright said they did not know whether Pinkerton had been diagnosed as having mental problems, or whether he was being given prescribed medication by the jail medical staff.

Pinkerton was also being held on a series of charges arising from a separate incident May 21 in which Pinkerton and an 11-year-old Bell Gardens boy were arrested for breaking into an Anaheim animal care vocational school and stealing a $1,750 macaw. Anaheim officers pursuing Pinkerton arrested him and the boy after Pinkerton crashed a car into a bank building.

Pinkerton pleaded not guilty May 28 to reduced charges in that incident, Osajima said.

Pinkerton was sent to the hospital in Norwalk last year after he threatened to jump off the roof of the Orange County Jail.

Independent Pathologist

In their May 14 vote to avert any conflicts of interest, the county supervisors also decided that an independent pathologist--one who doesn’t work for the coroner’s office--should conduct autopsies for those who die in the jail or in the sheriff’s custody.

Forensic pathologist Lou Daugherty, who does contract work for Napa, Sonoma and Contra Costa counties, is to conduct the Pinkerton autopsy, Enright said.

The Tuesday death of Pinkerton marks the first time the supervisors’ ruling has been applied in a jail death.