Autopsy Fails to Show Cause of Inmate’s Death

An autopsy has failed to determine why a 33-year-old inmate died Saturday in his cell in the Ventura County Jail medical ward, and blood and other samples have been forwarded to forensic experts for examination, officials said Wednesday.

“The cause is undetermined, and we’re awaiting drug testing and microscopic examination,” said Medical Examiner Ronald L. O’Halloran. “There was no trauma, no evidence of injury. There’s really no evidence to indicate suicide at this point.”

Such tests usually take three to four months.

Officials said the inmate, Steven Thompson of Oxnard, had a long criminal history and had been in the County Jail since March, awaiting trial for robbery and parole violations.

His death is the third this year in the County Jail--one by suicide and two by yet undetermined causes. The latter were getting medical treatment in jail. A Times investigation last year found that the jail has had an unusually high rate of inmate deaths since the 1980s.

O’Halloran said he was not sure whether Thompson had a history of illegal drug use. But a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, said the inmate had a drug abuse conviction within the last decade.

And his wife, Marie Rosalie Thompson, 53, of Oxnard, said he had drug problems in the past.

“He did have medical problems, epileptic seizures, and he’d had a few blackouts and was very dehydrated,” she said in an interview.

She said she talked with her husband Saturday morning, not long before his death. “He just told me he was tired, and he was going to lie down,” she said. “I guess about an hour after that they found him. But he was a strong man, and he shouldn’t have died like that.”

Thompson was discovered not breathing in a locked single-person cell in the jail’s medical ward at 11:10 a.m. Saturday, an hour after a deputy on rounds heard him snoring, said Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Kenneth Kipp, who oversees the jail.

Inmates in nearby cells said they heard nothing to indicate a problem, Kipp said.

Thompson had been in the infirmary for treatment of a condition not considered serious or life-threatening, Kipp said. He said he could not be specific about the ailment without written permission from Thompson’s family.

Kipp said Thompson had been convicted of drug abuse.

But since Thompson had been in custody for nearly a year, drugs were not the likely problem unless the inmate hoarded his medication or somehow acquired narcotics illicitly, the chief deputy said.

Thompson had been in state prison for all but two months since 1998, when he was convicted of second-degree robbery and a parole violation for failing to register as a sex offender. The second crime resulted from a 1991 conviction for sexual battery and indecent exposure, Kipp said.

Released last summer, Thompson was rearrested Aug. 29 on suspicion of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He returned to prison in Wasco, and had been in the County Jail since March, awaiting trial on the new charges.

A Times study found in December that the Ventura County Jail has had an unusually high rate of inmate deaths since a Monterey firm, California Forensic Medical Group, began providing health and psychiatric care 15 years ago.

State records show that the death rate for Ventura County Jail inmates from 1987-2000 was fourth-highest among the state’s 20 largest jail systems. Only Stanislaus, Los Angeles and San Francisco counties had higher death rates per year per 1,000 inmates. For the seven years before California Forensic gained the Ventura County contract, typically one local inmate died each year. But that number has doubled on average during the firm’s tenure, and peaked at six in 1997.

Of the 30 deaths from 1987 to 2001, one was a homicide, eight were suicides and 21 were classified as deaths by natural causes. The inmates’ average age at death was younger than 40.

In January, the county Board of Supervisors awarded California Forensic a new five-year contract worth about $26 million.

Law enforcement officials cited low cost and high quality as chief reasons for rehiring the firm instead of accepting a rival proposal from Prison Health Services of Nashville, the nation’s largest provider of health care in jails.

Kipp said he has seen nothing to indicate that the quality of health care had anything to do with the three deaths this year. As is policy, the first two cases were referred to an independent physician for review, and experts found no problem with care, Kipp said. The Thompson case will be handled the same way.

“My information is that the medical care they received was more than adequate,” Kipp said.