Family of man who died from Covid while incarcerated sues California prison system

The family of a man who died of Covid-19 in a California prison has filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s prison system and high-ranking prison administrators over their handling of the pandemic.

On Wednesday, attorneys representing the family of Daniel Ruiz filed a wrongful death lawsuit against California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) officials and several medical administrators at the California Institute for Men (CIM), an all men’s prison in southern California.

The suit alleges that prison officials and administrators acted with deliberate indifference when failing to take enough precautions to curb the spread of Covid during a May prison transfer that saw 122 men bussed from CIM to Corcoran and San Quentin State prisons. Before the transfer, San Quentin had reported no positive cases of Covid-19 and Corcoran had just one. But within a month of the transfer, Corcoran reported almost 130 infections and San Quentin reached nearly 1,200 cases.

Ruiz, 61, had been housed at San Quentin since January 2020. He contracted Covid shortly after the transfer, and died on 11 July.

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The father of six children had asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which put him at high risk of succumbing to Covid-19. His family learned of his diagnosis and his two-week stay in a San Francisco hospital just days before his death, according to the lawsuit.

“Nobody wants their parents to suffer and die like that,” said Daniel Ruiz Jr, Ruiz’s son, in a statement on Wednesday.

“It was agonizing for me, it was agonizing for us all. We watched him pass away on Zoom,” said Ruiz’s daughter, Vanessa Robinson, in the same statement.

In February, the California inspector general found that California prison administrators had dismissed the pleas of nurses about the dangers of transferring prisoners from one facility to another without widespread Covid-19 testing. The nurses had also raised concerns about transporting people in vehicles where social distancing was impossible. At least 26 incarcerated people and three staff members died of coronavirus at San Quentin, the inspector general found, and 2,170 people – the majority of the prison’s population – were infected.

“By May, we knew there was a deadly pandemic and they still packed all these guys into buses. Then they got them to San Quentin and didn’t isolate them. Everybody in the decision chain needs to be held accountable,” said Julia Sherwin, lead attorney on the Ruiz family’s case, to the Guardian.

The CDCR has yet to be served with the lawsuit, a spokesperson told the Guardian.

Nearly 50,000 people in CDCR custody and almost 16,000 staff members have been infected with Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. There are currently 44 positive Covid cases, according to CDCR’s Covid tracking tool. At least 40% of the state’s prison population has been vaccinated.

The ramifications of the late-May transfer continue to be felt by the families who lost their loved ones. The attorneys representing Ruiz are also representing the family of Sgt Gilbert Polanco, a San Quentin prison guard who died in early August after contracting Covid-19. They plan to file another wrongful death lawsuit against CDCR in the coming months.

“The family wants to obtain justice for Daniel and prevent this thing from happening in the future. The transfer endangered everybody. It brought Covid not just to the prisoners, but to staff, their families and entire communities,” Sherwin said.