Brandon Yates called his mother on Jan. 15, 2024, seeking bail money. He was in a San Diego jail after being arrested for sleeping in someone’s shed amid a mental health crisis. Andrea Carrier told her son that she didn’t have the money and that he should call his dad.
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It was the last time they would ever speak, Carrier said, choking up.
Less than 24 hours after his arrest, Yates was dead. After Yates got off the phone, his cellmate allegedly tortured, raped and killed him. As the 24-year-old screamed, begged and pressed a panic button for help, deputies ignored him for about an hour, according to a recently filed lawsuit.
By the time they found Yates, the cellmate is alleged to have broken his neck, strangled him, poured liquid soap in his mouth and staged his naked body to look like Jesus on the cross.
A year later, Carrier and Yates’s father, Dan, are suing San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez and several sheriff’s deputies, accusing them of wrongful death, deliberate indifference and negligence.
In a 50-page complaint filed last week in the U.S. District Court for Southern California, Carrier and Dan Yates allege that the county, Martinez and her deputies caused their son’s death by housing him with a “gravely mentally ill” inmate with a long history of violence and then ignoring their son’s pleas for help when that inmate attacked him.
Carrier, 61, and Dan Yates, 64, said that their son’s death is part of a decades-long problem at the San Diego Central Jail that has caused several inmates’ deaths. They hope their lawsuit pushes officials to make changes that will save inmates’ lives.
“We … are really demanding that we look at all these issues and bring about change to stop future jail deaths,” Dan Yates said.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on the lawsuit beyond saying that the office “extends our sympathies to everyone impacted by the death of Brandon Yates.”
Carrier said her son began using drugs, primarily heroin and methamphetamine, after starting a relationship around 2019 with someone who soon suffered a relapse.
Over the next five years, he struggled on and off with addiction, his parents said. Brandon Yates overdosed a couple of times, depriving his brain of oxygen, Carrier said. He started suffering from memory loss, disorganized thinking and “schizophrenia-type” symptoms, she said.
He spent seven months in 2023 in a rehabilitation program but was kicked out when he stopped taking his prescribed medications and his mental health deteriorated, Carrier said. For the next five months, his parents said, they tried to get him back into treatment, but he resisted.
About a week before he died, he was arrested for sleeping on someone’s porch, his father said. A judge freed him from jail, noting he had no criminal history. But when he was arrested Jan. 15, 2024, for nearly identical behavior, he was locked up.
Yates immediately annoyed his cellmates by babbling nonsense nonstop, causing one of them to tell a deputy that “there would be trouble” if he wasn’t moved, according to the lawsuit.
Deputy Matthew Blackburn allegedly put him in a cell with Alvin McDonald Ruis III, who 2½ weeks earlier had been arrested and charged with domestic violence, stalking, burglary, violating a restraining order and willful cruelty to a child, according to the suit.
In the weeks leading up to his arrest, Ruis had a psychotic episode and was involuntarily committed multiple times, the suit states.
After Ruis was jailed, officials declared him a danger to himself and others, designating him as someone who needed to be separated from other inmates, according to the lawsuit. He started having auditory hallucinations, tried to hang himself with a rope he made out of his jail clothes, talked compulsively about God and grabbed a deputy through his cell’s food slot, the suit states.
Even though Blackburn knew about Ruis’s history, the deputy put Yates with him in a cell – alone, the lawsuit alleges. Blackburn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Within minutes, Yates and Ruis, both of whom suffered from hyper-religiosity, talked about God, according to the lawsuit. The conversation quickly turned contentious. Ruis, believing he took orders directly from God, decided that Yates, who believed he was Jesus, was the Devil, according to the suit. He allegedly told Yates he was going to kill him.
Yates pressed the cell’s emergency intercom button to get help, saying, “They are going to kill me,” according to the suit. At one point, Ruis allegedly pressed the button himself.
No one came, the lawsuit alleges.
Over the next hour, Ruis tried to excise the Devil he believed was inside Yates in ways that his parents described as torture. He is alleged to have punched and kicked him. Ruis, a former championship-caliber wrestler, got on Yates’s back and put him in a chokehold until he passed out, the lawsuit states. Noticing Yates was alive, he allegedly poured liquid soap into his nose and mouth, then smothered him with a green jail blanket. With Yates still breathing, Ruis blocked his nose and mouth until he stopped moving, according to the lawsuit.
Ruis then allegedly stripped him naked and sexually assaulted him with a bar of soap. He was in the process of binding Yates’s hands and feet so he could stage his body when deputies arrived, the lawsuit states.
Dan Yates said his son was an “X Games-type of young boy” with a thrill-seeker attitude that carried into adulthood. He loved surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, off-road biking and deep sea fishing, his parents said. When Brandon Yates went to Las Vegas with his dad and brothers, he bungee jumped off the Strat Hotel, Casino and Tower, formerly known as the Stratosphere, while the others anxiously watched.
Her son’s professional ambitions had shifted in recent years, Carrier said. He loved his job as a commercial fisherman but was realizing the toll it was taking on his body. He’d recently pivoted to the idea of being a pastor, something he thought was more conducive to his goal of getting married and having children.
Brandon Yates’s parents said their lawsuit is intended to force officials to create and enact policies that will prevent future deaths. Those include correctly classifying inmates based on how dangerous they are and grouping them accordingly, staggering patrol schedules so inmates can’t predict guards’ movements and inspecting cells more frequently.
But more than anything, Carrier said, the sheriff’s office needs to inject empathy and value for human life into its culture. That an inmate screamed for help for an hour and was ignored should be a wake-up call, she said.
“It’s a broken system,” Carrier said, adding: “It’s a broken culture.”