After pressing a panic button multiple times to try to summon deputies to his cell, a man was tortured and murdered by a fellow inmate in a San Diego County jail last year, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Monday. The family of Brandon Yates claim the county, the county's sheriff, Kelly Martinez, and individual deputies and jailhouse staff are liable for their son’s wrongful death because of their indifference, negligence, lack of training, supervision, discipline and lack of proper policies to keep inmates safe, Courthouse News reports. “They failed to protect our son, like so many others whose deaths were preventable. The San Diego County jail system doesn’t seem to value human life. The sheriff's department is aware of the existing problems but consistently ignores them,” said Dan Yates, Brandon’s father, at a press conference announcing the filling of the suit in downtown San Diego on Tuesday.
In January 2024, 24-year-old Brandon Yates was arrested and booked into San Diego Central Jail on suspicion of burglary after he was found sleeping in someone else’s backyard shed. According to the Yates family's complaint, a deputy named Matthew Blackburn transferred Brandon to the cell of a man named Alvin Ruis, who was arrested on charges of domestic violence and willful cruelty to a child relating to an assault on his wife and children. Ruis had a history of violent and psychotic behavior, as well as religious delusions and hallucinations, the Yates family claims, including threatening to attack other inmates, threatening to kill himself and attacking deputies. Ruis, the plaintiffs say, decided Yates was the devil and that he had permission from God to take his time to torture him before killing him. According to the family’s complaint, Yates tried to press an emergency intercom button in his cell multiple times to summon deputies, but those calls, as well as shouting from other inmates trying to get deputies attention, were muted and ignored for nearly an hour while Ruis killed Yates. Eugene Iredale of Iredale and Yoo APC, the Yates family’s attorney, said during the press conference that Ruis had even pressed the emergency button “to see if he could be stopped from what he was doing.” Ruis was in the process of trying to stage Yates' body like the crucifixion of Jesus Christ when deputies arrived for their hourly check, according to the complaint. The sheriff’s office seems to have a culture of “negligence and disregard for human life” stemming from a lack of strong leadership, Dan Yates said.
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