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E-mail StoryFamily not notified of federal detainee's death at Lerdo Jail
| Friday, May 9 2008 3:21 PM
Last Updated: Friday, May 9 2008 3:36 PM
Walter Rodriguez-Castro regularly wrote to his family in the San Francisco Bay Area from his cell in Lerdo Jail.
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Average number of federal inmates in local jail per day last year
169
Amount paid each day to county, per inmate
$63
Sheriff’s department's share
$56.80
Kern Medical Center's share
$6.20
Total paid in last year
$3.5 million
Source: Sheriff’s Lt. Earl Barnes
In spring 2006, Rodriguez-Castro was held in a portion of the local jail reserved for federal detainees.
Then in late April 2006, the flow of letters stopped.
The family of the 28-year-old illegal immigrant from El Salvador called the jail to find out what was going on.
His mother, Ana Castro of San Francisco, and his wife, Caterina Ormeno of Daly City, got no answers.
Finally on June 27 of that year, Ormeno went to a scheduled immigration hearing for her husband in San Francisco. He wasn’t there. She asked why.
He was dead, she learned.
He died April 23, 2006, at San Joaquin Hospital from complications due to meningitis and HIV, the Kern County coroner’s staff reported.
While the jail regularly releases information when a local inmate dies behind bars, the county does not do so when the inmate is being held for the federal government. In fact, Rodriguez-Castro’s death remained relatively unknown until a New York Times nationwide investigation into in-custody deaths.
The experience of Rodriguez-Castro’s family is a familiar pattern, according to the investigation.
As far as Rodriguez-Castro’s mother knew, her son was healthy. He worked for a moving company and he used to play ball at a park in Daly City, she told The Californian in a telephone conversation.
He was arrested March 1, 2006 at the park on an immigration hold, and spent some time in a Yuba County jail before he was transferred April 17, 2006, to the Lerdo Jail. Just six days before his death.
The late notice of the death hurt the family.
“I felt bad,” Castro said. "He was my son. I thought, ‘It can’t be.’”
Ormeno continues to care for the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, Liset.
Rodriguez-Castro first came to America in 1992 at age 12, his mother said. He was deported in 2000 and then returned sometime later, according to immigration officials.
Rodriguez-Castro is one of 66 federal detainees who died in custody between January 2004 and November 2007, The New York Times learned in a Freedom of Information Act request.
He was one of three who died at local jails, all of natural causes.
Kern County, as do many other local and private jails in the country, has a federal contract to accept detainees for reimbursement at the rate of $63 a day. Detainees spend time in the local jails until their immigration or deportation hearings.
The Times story said both families and the newspaper found it difficult to obtain information.
Families often don’t complain out of fear something will happen to them.
“We never (complained),” Castro said.
When a detainee dies, the sheriff notifies — as it did in the Rodriguez-Castro case — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The federal agency then is required to notify the family and the detainee’s country consulate.
The consulate was notified but a miscommunication between the San Francisco and Bakersfield immigration offices led to neither one calling the family, agency spokeswoman Virginia C. Kice said.
“We deeply regret the problem and offer the family our sincere apologies,” Kice said.
Kice said the system provides good health care to some 300,000 detainees nationwide, for which it pays about $100 million a year.
The detainees are housed in a patchwork of local and privately run detention facilities.
Often health problems are first detected in the examination process, she said. That’s apparently what happened to Rodriguez-Castro.
The number of detainee deaths has decreased in recent years from a high of 29 in 2004 to only 7 in 2007, Kice reported.
The other detainees who died in Kern County were Jamer Singh, 40, on Sept. 20, 2006, from a heart disease, and Jose Rangel Rodriguez, 32, on March 3, 2004 from AIDS.