Deadly Lockup

“She was my mom and you killed her!”

The emotion was unmistakable at a recent protest outside the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility from the young son of Carmela DeVargas, a 34-year-old woman who died in a hospital after being incarcerated on an alleged probation violation at the jail in November 2019.

The target of his outrage: jail guards who were monitoring the rally.

The families of DeVargas and Rex Corcoran Jr.—who died, also at 34, in the jail’s custody days after DeVargas—marched and chanted outside the sprawling lockup south of town in part because they wanted prisoners inside to hear them calling for change.

They want an investigation into the deaths of DeVargas and Corcoran. Corcoran’s mother, Susie Schmitt, filed a lawsuit against the County Commission and about a dozen jail officials and staff members including Warden Derek Williams on Nov. 5.

DeVargas’ father attended the protest on Nov. 6 with her son, who he is now raising. The elder DeVargas filed a lawsuit against the county in February.

DeVargas and Corcoran are two of at least five people who have died while in the jail’s custody or immediately after being released since January 2019, according to county spokeswoman Carmelina Hart. There have been at least two in-custody deaths this year, one by suicide and the other by possible drug overdose.

Attorneys who are familiar with the jail and the families of those who have died in custody say there’s a pattern of negligence by jail officials and guards, particularly when it comes to medical care and treatment for drug users, that spans decades.

“The sad irony is it’s a community jail,” says Mark Donatelli, one of the lawyers representing Schmitt.

Several people have died at the jail through the years by suicide or overdose after families turned them in because they were assured by probation officers that their loved ones would be safer in the jail, where they’d be isolated and would have access to medical staff, says Donatelli, who has practiced civil rights law in New Mexico since the 1970s.

“It’s just the countless situations like that we’ve seen over the decades that’s inexcusable,” he tells SFR.

The US Department of Justice investigated the jail in 2003 after a prisoner killed himself in the medical unit and found that “persons confined suffer harm or the risk of serious harm from deficiencies in the facility’s provision of medical and mental health care,” along with suicide prevention, fire safety and sanitation, and that some of the conditions violated prisoners’ constitutional rights.

In the same findings letter, the Justice Department listed over 50 measures for the county to take, including revising policies and procedures to ensure that all prisoners are screened and, if needed, treated appropriately if they report or exhibit signs of drug or alcohol withdrawal. The DOJ also required that the county retain practitioners in health services who are able to provide adequate and timely treatment and monitor prisoners with serious medical needs.

DOJ and the county entered an agreement in 2008, marking “a voluntary effort by the county to meet the concerns” raised by the investigation while also noting that it didn’t “serve as an admission by the county that corrective measures are necessary to meet the constitutional and statutory rights of inmates.”

But deaths stemming from alleged inadequate medical care have continued.

Breanna Vasquez, 22, died of spinal meningitis in a hospital in November 2014 after guards ignored her requests for medical care, with one supervisor accusing her of “faking,” according to a tort claim that led to her family settling with the county for $400,000.

Five years later, DeVargas reportedly went through a similar experience.

She died from sepsis related to an infection that, according to her family’s lawsuit, went untreated until it was irreversible, partly because she was a drug user and guards didn’t take her medical requests seriously. She’d been in jail for two months.

The same day DeVargas died, Nov. 9, Corcoran—who was incarcerated for missing a compliance meeting—was taken to the medical unit for observation after guards saw him falling down in the shower, defecating on himself and unable to stand, but didn’t receive any treatment and wasn’t taken to the hospital until he was found collapsed over 12 hours later, his family’s lawsuit alleges.

Schmitt wasn’t notified that her son was at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center until Nov. 12, despite her repeated attempts in the days prior to get in contact with him, according to that lawsuit. By the time she arrived at the hospital, Corcoran was unconscious and on life support.

“I need justice,” Schmitt says in an interview with SFR. “They totally neglected him and left him to die without helping him at all. Mr. DeVargas and I…we have lost our children and we want to make changes so someone else does not go through this because it is the worst thing ever.”

Schmitt and DeVargas have been circulating a petition in an attempt to empanel a grand jury to investigate “acts of malfeasance, misfeasance and any other illegal act” committed by county employees. Under state law, they must collect signatures from 2% of registered voters in Santa Fe County—or about 2,150 people.

Along with many other advocates, they’ve also pushed for the jail to implement a more comprehensive MAT, or medication-assisted treatment, program for opioid dependence.

DeVargas was taking Suboxone and Corcoran was taking methadone when they were incarcerated, two medications that can be used to assist with opioid withdrawal. The jail failed to continue that treatment, according to the lawsuits, despite staff members being familiar with Corcoran and having previously documented his history with substance abuse.

The county has yet to respond to the lawsuit Schmitt filed. Last month, a federal judge dismissed many of the claims against individual county employees made in the DeVargas lawsuit, but ruled that there’s sufficient evidence for some of the claims to move forward.

DeVargas’ father and her son are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which alleges violations of the Eighth and 14th amendments to the Constitution and seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

Hart declined to comment on the lawsuits and Williams, the warden, refused an interview with SFR through Hart.