Jail Slayings Couldn’t Have Been Prevented, Medical Head Says

The Orange County Jail’s medical director testified Tuesday that his staff had no way to know that it was dangerous to put inmate Jerry Thomas Pick in cells with two other inmates he is accused of killing in January.

But the director, Dr. Christopher Lundquist, conceded under questioning by a federal judge that the deaths might have been prevented if video cameras had been installed in the medical isolation cells where the two deaths occurred.

The federal court hearing, at the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana on jail medical care, came less than two hours after Pick, 23, was bound over for trial in the two deaths by Central Municipal Judge James M. Brooks after a seven-day preliminary hearing.

Pick is charged with murder in the Jan. 17 death of John Franklin Wilcox, 71, and in the death of Arthur Oviedo, 25, on Jan. 31. Pick had been a cell mate with each of them at the time they died.

Wilcox’s death was originally listed as from natural causes. It wasn’t until Oviedo was found strangled that a second autopsy was ordered for Wilcox. This time pathologists discovered what had been overlooked before--that Wilcox’s death was caused by blows to his ribs.

Lundquist’s testimony was the first public reaction by the jail medical staff to the two deaths. County officials had refused to comment before because the matter was being investigated.

But Deputy County Counsel Edward N. Duran, bothered by criticism regarding those deaths by the American Civil Liberties Union and Pick’s attorney, Milton Grimes, had a parade of doctors ready to defend the jail’s medical practices.

The hearing before U.S. District Judge William P. Gray was sought by the ACLU, which wanted the judge to order the county to install video cameras in some medical isolation cells at the jail.

Gray refused, saying he was pleased with the county’s progress in jail matters and did not want to interfere.

But Gray did express concern about how the Oviedo and Wilcox deaths occurred. At one point, he said to Lundquist: “You made a bad mistake, didn’t you?”

But the judge later added: “We know now that the (medical) staff here is fallible. But that’s hindsight. I can’t get over the fact that the county shows it is trying very hard to make improvements at the jail.”

Lundquist testified that, despite criticisms that Pick should have been kept in a cell by himself, there was nothing in Pick’s medical file to indicate that he would be dangerous to other inmates. And without a proper autopsy on Wilcox, Lundquist said, there was no way to know that any other inmate was in danger.

Both the ACLU’s attorney, Dick Herman, and Deputy County Counsel Duran were willing to go head to head on a full-scale hearing over the jail’s medical care.

But Gray refused to have any part in it. He cut off Duran’s cross-examination of Herman’s medical expert and later refused to let Duran question further witnesses, commenting several times, “I don’t want to hear it.”

But Gray did want to hear from Lundquist about the TV monitors.

The Board of Supervisors Tuesday morning approved spending $30,000 to buy and install TV monitors for the four padded cells on the medical floor--rubber rooms, many officials call them.

The ACLU’s Herman asked Gray at least to order that two of the monitors go to the medical isolation section, where the last three jail deaths have occurred.

But Lundquist advised the judge that the monitors were more needed in the padded rooms. Also, Lundquist said, he doubted that Wilcox, Oviedo or Pick would have been considered acute enough cases to merit a cell monitored by cameras, even if a couple of them had been installed in medical isolation.

Lundquist said such cameras might have helped get medical aid to the two men killed, but such surveillance could not have prevented what happened to them.

Gray held the hearing after touring the jail’s medical facility, plus the medical ward of the new Intake/Release Center, scheduled to open in August.

Gray called the new facility “an excellent improvement over the current facility.”