Inmate’s Death Reclassified as Accident

Ventura County authorities have agreed to change the death certificate of a 24-year-old man who died in a County Jail facility from “suicide” to “accident” as part of a legal settlement with the dead man’s family, the family’s lawyer said Thursday.

The settlement, reached Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, also calls for payment of an undisclosed sum to the family, which claimed that the man died because jail officials failed to provide medical attention quickly enough.

Larry Condon, a Simi Valley truck mechanic, was arrested in April, 1980, on charges of raping a 10-year-old girl. Condon denied any connection with the crime, and according to the family’s attorney, Michael Mitchell, subsequent medical tests showed the girl had not been raped.

Condon was booked into the Ventura County East Valley Jail and was found the next morning hanging from a bed sheet by a deputy who was escorting another prisoner into the lockup.

Locked Up Prisoner

According to Mitchell, the deputy continued walking the prisoner down the walkway, locked him up in one of the cells, then walked back out to the jailer’s office and waited for the officer there to get off the phone. When he did not, the deputy went to the watch commander and alerted him to the hanging.

Officers rushed back to Condon’s cell and immediately began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Mitchell said. Condon’s heart and breathing began functioning again, an indication that he had not been hanging long, the lawyer said.

“The significance of it is he was not hanging for a very long time at all, and the three-to-three-and-a-half-minute delay is probably what killed him,” Mitchell said.

After a one-week trial before U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall, a federal jury Wednesday concluded that the deputy who discovered the hanging had failed to take reasonable action to summon medical help, and that failure caused Condon’s death.

Earlier Trial

A federal court jury in an earlier trial awarded $500,000 to Condon’s mother, Diane, but the judgment was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that negligence on the part of jail officials did not constitute a violation of Condon’s civil rights.

The new trial was commenced under a state law that requires deputies in such cases to take reasonable action to summon medical care.

Attorneys for the county could not be reached for comment.