Petaluma family asks court to sanction Sonoma County over missing video of jail suicide

The family of a man who died by suicide in Sonoma County Jail in 2019 has filed a motion to sanction the county and sheriff for allegedly destroying critical surveillance video of the moments surrounding the death.

The motion, filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco by Sebastopol lawyer Izaak Schwaiger, is the latest development in the case of Nino Bosco, a 30-year-old Petaluma man who was found unresponsive in his booking cell in July 17, 2019.

Bosco had been in custody since his arrest a month earlier on suspicion of violating a restraining order when he forced a bologna sandwich down his throat, blocking his windpipe.

He had previously told jail officials he was bipolar, schizophrenic and suicidal and had been rushed to the hospital only hours before his death for a similar attempt to asphyxiate himself using items from his lunch.

Top-ranking officials with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and the company hired to provide medical services to detainees at the jail failed to protect Bosco, his family alleged in a 2020 lawsuit.

Schwaiger, who is representing Bosco’s mother Frauka Kozar, alleged in Friday’s motion that since the lawsuit was filed, the sheriff’s office has failed to provide surveillance video from the jail showing Bosco’s death.

Copies of emails included in the motion indicate the department doesn’t have that footage, which Schwaiger said it is has a legal and procedural requirement to preserve. The video it does have and has turned over ends 10 minutes before Bosco was discovered by jail staff and restarts four minutes after, when efforts to revive him were underway.

“If the county knew to save some videos, but not these very important videos, it begs the question as to why,” Schwaiger told The Press Democrat.

Schwaiger alerted the county last month of the 14-minute gap in the video footage. Deputy County Counsel Matthew Lilligren responded in an email that the sheriff’s office had produced all available video of the incident but would be double checking its logs to determine whether any others existed.

In-custody suicides immediately trigger an internal investigation, which calls for preservation of all evidence. State and federal law also bar the destruction of evidence if there is the possibility of future litigation.

Lilligren, the deputy county counsel, confirmed in an email to The Press Democrat that not all the relevant video was saved.

“It appears that there may be portions of surveillance video from July 17, 2019 that did not fully copy to the thumb drives that were used by the Sheriff’s Office to store relevant video related to this incident shortly after the incident occurred,” Lilligren said. “Because the video recording system in the jail is only capable of retaining video for one year, the additional segments of video can no longer be retrieved directly from the surveillance video system.”

Review of surveillance archives for the video is ongoing, but Lilligren said it would take a significant amount of time to examine the more than 280,000 stored files.

Schwaiger would not speculate on whether the county had intentionally destroyed evidence, which is a crime.

“Right now, we don’t know what happened, so all I’m left with is my suspicions,” he said. “But if the choice is between ‘the county was negligent’ or ‘the county willfully destroyed evidence,’ neither one of those inspires terrible confidence in the administration of that jail.”

After returning from the hospital following his first asphyxiation attempt on July 17, Bosco was left in a so-called safety cell of the booking area designed to minimize risk of injury or self-harm, according to sheriff’s office spokeswoman Misti Wood. During that time, correctional deputies were checking on Bosco twice every 30 minutes.

However, surveillance video of the booking area that night shows jail staff only observed Bosco for a total of four seconds during the hour and a half before he was discovered unresponsive, the new court filing alleges.

After he was found unresponsive and without a pulse, staff did not begin CPR for more than two minutes, and never cleared his airway of the sandwich, according to the filing.

Representatives for the sheriff’s office and the county declined to comment on the circumstances surrounding his death.

The county jail has reported at least nine in-custody deaths since the beginning of 2017, according to data from the state Attorney General’s Office.

Mental health issues are common among jail detainees, affecting at least half of those in custody in the 2020-21 fiscal year, said Wood, the sheriff’s office spokeswoman.

Each detainee gets a mental health screening during booking and is evaluated to determine where they should be housed and what treatment, if any, they should receive. Bosco was housed in the Mental Health Unit until he was transferred to the booking area.

The internal investigation into Bosco’s death was completed and had been forwarded in January 2020 to the county’s Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach, or IOLERO, for review.

Karlene Navarro, director of IOLERO, did not respond Monday to multiple requests for comment over email and by phone.

The sheriff’s office has previously been accused of destroying critical video evidence. IOLERO faulted the department for losing or never creating videos and reports related to the 2015 “yard counseling” lawsuit, which alleged that multiple correctional deputies used excessive force against detainees at the jail. The county settled the lawsuit for $1.7 Million

The county has two weeks from Friday to review the motion for sanctions and address specific legal arguments in its response. Trial is currently scheduled for June 6, 2022.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for Kozar stemming from the death of her son.

“This is our government that is entrusted with the safety of people’s lives, and if they have no explanation for what happened to these videos, that’s a problem,” Schwaiger said. “If the people who have the most to lose are in control of what video is kept and what is not, I think that’s just a recipe for disaster.”

You can reach Staff Writer Emily Wilder at 602-736-5270 or emily.wilder@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @vv1lder.