Jessica Watson, 36, was freed on her own recognizance the day after deputies found her unresponsive in her cell, a practice the State Auditor has warned can keep jail-related deaths out of official counts.
Deputies making a welfare check at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin at about 8:36 p.m. on Oct. 13 found Jessica Watson sitting on the lower bunk of her cell, unresponsive, with “what appeared to be a ligature around her neck,” the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said. Deputies and jail medical staff began lifesaving measures. “Although Ms. Watson had a pulse, she remained unresponsive,” the office said. “She was transported by ambulance to a local hospital for further medical treatment.”
At about 5:22 p.m. the next day, roughly 21 hours later, Watson “was released from custody on her own recognizance,” according to the Sheriff’s Office account reported by Bay City News. It was not clear whether she ever left the hospital. She was pronounced dead there at about 7:52 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22. Alameda County records show her criminal case was dismissed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Watson, 36, of Oakland, is at least the fourth person to die this year after falling ill or being found unresponsive while held at Santa Rita, Alameda County’s main jail, according to Sheriff’s Office announcements reported in the press. Her cause of death is pending an autopsy and toxicology tests, and the Sheriff’s Office has not said how she died. The office said it notified the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the state attorney general.
Her case is unusual in one respect that matters beyond Dublin. Under the law that governs how California jails report deaths, a person’s custody status at the moment of death can determine whether that death is counted at all.
A timeline from the Sheriff’s Office
According to the Sheriff’s Office, Hayward police arrested Watson on outstanding warrants for domestic violence and driving under the influence. She was booked into Santa Rita at about 2:47 a.m. on Oct. 10.
Three days later came the welfare check. The office has not said how often Watson had been checked before that, whether she had been screened as a suicide risk at intake, or whether she was housed alone. It has not released the name of the hospital.
The release on her own recognizance the next afternoon ended the Sheriff’s Office’s custody of her. Under that kind of release, a person is freed on a promise to appear in court rather than on bail. Her case was later dismissed.
The circumstances surrounding the death are under investigation, the Sheriff’s Office said.
Why the release matters
In 2022, the California State Auditor examined deaths in county jails, focusing on San Diego County and comparing it with Alameda, Orange and Riverside counties. Among its findings: sheriff’s departments had not reported some deaths that followed incidents in jails because the people were released before they died.
The auditor found instances in which coroners or medical examiners described people dying in hospitals after attempted suicides or medical emergencies in county jails, yet the counties did not report those deaths to the attorney general. The reason, the auditor wrote, was that the reporting law requires sheriffs to report “only those individuals who died while in custody at the time of death and not individuals who died after having been released.”
The report illustrated the point with a composite timeline drawn from sheriff’s records: a person attempts suicide in a county jail on July 1 and is taken to a hospital; on July 10 the sheriff “compassionately released the individual from custody”; on July 15 the person dies in the hospital of the injuries. That death, the auditor noted, was one state law did not require to be reported.
The auditor recommended that the Legislature require sheriffs to report to the attorney general anyone “released from custody after being transported directly to a hospital or similar medical facility” who then dies there, along with the cause and manner of death, and that the state Justice Department publish the data each year. In its response, the department said there was “no statutory requirement” for it to collect such information and that it would need express authority and funding.
The current text of Penal Code Section 10008, which requires agencies to post basic information about in-custody deaths on their websites within 10 days, still turns on custody. It applies “when a person … who is in custody dies,” and it defines an in-custody death to include deaths “that occur in medical facilities while in law-enforcement custody.” A person released from custody before dying, even in the same hospital bed, falls outside that definition on its face.
In Watson’s case, the Sheriff’s Office did announce the death and notify prosecutors and the attorney general, so the case did not go unreported. The Chronicle described the notification as required by law for custody-related deaths. What remains unclear is whether her death will be listed among in-custody deaths in state data, which researchers and journalists use to compare jails across California.
Four deaths in seven months
Watson’s death follows three others this year at the jail.
On March 13, Kenyonna Farr, 37, of Oakland, died after being found unresponsive twice in two days, KTVU reported. She was found in a holding cell on a Thursday morning when she was due in court, taken to a hospital, cleared to return, and found unresponsive again at 3:42 a.m. the next day, Sgt. Roberto Morales, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman, told the station. She died about 30 minutes later. Morales did not know why she had been cleared to return to the jail, KTVU reported.
On May 28, deputies found Brandon Anthony Josep Watson, 37, of San Francisco, unresponsive in his bunk after he “failed to respond for breakfast,” the Sheriff’s Office said. He had been booked the day before after the California Highway Patrol arrested him on suspicion of stealing a vehicle, and he died on May 31, according to KTVU. He is not known to be related to Jessica Watson.
About a week later, Jeffrey Bryce McMaster, 44, of Oakland, collapsed in a restroom at the jail’s outpatient facility roughly an hour after he was discharged from a hospital and returned to the jail, SFist reported. He had been treated after a seizure in his cell and had been held since February on a murder charge.
In February, Dequita Grace Harrell, 36, died in the women’s restroom of the jail lobby while visiting someone held there. She was not in custody and is not counted among this year’s in-custody deaths.
Running tallies kept by news outlets differ. KTVU called Farr the jail’s 76th in-custody death since 2014 and, in its report on Brandon Watson, called him the 76th as well; SFist counted McMaster as the 78th. The Inquirer was unable to reconcile the figures, and the Sheriff’s Office’s own transparency page could not be accessed for this article.
Three of the four people who died this year had been taken to a hospital shortly before their deaths: Farr and McMaster were sent back to the jail, and Jessica Watson was released while still in care.
Under a federal consent decree
Santa Rita has operated since 2022 under a federal consent decree in Babu v. County of Alameda, a class action brought on behalf of people held in the jail by the San Francisco firm Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved the decree on Feb. 7, 2022, and it can remain in effect for up to six years. It requires changes in mental health care, suicide prevention, the use of safety cells and the amount of time people spend outside their cells. The U.S. Justice Department had issued its own findings on the jail’s mental health care in April 2021.
Court-appointed experts report on the county’s progress twice a year. The latest reports show steady gains alongside persistent gaps.
The mental health expert, E. Carolina Montoya, a psychologist,, found in her eighth report, filed May 11 and covering July through December 2025, that the county was in substantial compliance with 16 provisions and partial compliance with 56. Six had been found compliant long enough that monitoring was discontinued. One remained in noncompliance. In her first report, in July 2022, 15 provisions were in noncompliance and none were in substantial compliance.
The single provision still out of compliance concerns suicide precautions. The decree requires that a qualified mental health professional see people on suicide precautions “on an individualized schedule based on actual suicide risk, for instance, daily or hourly as needed.” Montoya wrote: “This is not occurring.” She noted that people at risk of suicide are housed in therapeutic units with daily rounds and checks by deputies every 15 minutes.
The report also found that there had been no suicides during the six-month period it covered. A separate provision requires the county to perform formal “psychological autopsies” after suicides; Montoya wrote that she had not yet reviewed any, though six supervisors at Alameda County Behavioral Health had been trained to conduct them. The vacancy rate in direct clinical positions fell from 46 percent to 38 percent, she found.
The custody expert, Terri McDonald, found in her eighth report, dated June 1, that the jail averaged about 115 deputies a day, up from about 110, but still below the county’s own benchmark of 120. As of Jan. 3, the Sheriff’s Office had 241 deputy vacancies, a 43 percent vacancy rate, down from 282 six months earlier. The county had not completed a staffing analysis sufficient to meet the decree, the expert found, and overtime remained heavy.
The decree does not address what happens to people released from custody while hospitalized. Whether Watson’s death will be examined under the decree’s suicide-review provisions, which apply to suicides and serious suicide attempts in the jail, has not been disclosed. The cause of her death has not been determined.
How Alameda County compares
The State Auditor’s 2022 report offers one of the few side-by-side comparisons. From 2006 through 2020, 99 people died in Alameda County’s jails, compared with 104 in Riverside County, 111 in Orange County and 185 in San Diego County, which the auditor singled out for the highest death rate among the four after accounting for bookings and jail population.
The auditor also found that none of the four counties’ policies, nor the state’s minimum standards, required staff conducting safety checks to look for proof of life. A 2021 death at Santa Rita showed what that can mean: Maurice Monk had been dead in his cell for at least 72 hours before he was found. Three deputies were indicted last December in connection with his death, SFist reported.
For San Francisco readers, Santa Rita is not a distant facility. Brandon Watson was a San Francisco resident, and the jail holds people arrested across Alameda County, from Berkeley to Fremont.
What happens next
The coroner’s findings on Watson’s cause and manner of death are pending, and the District Attorney’s Office and the attorney general have been notified. The court’s experts report twice a year; their next reports would cover the first half of 2026, when Farr, Brandon Watson and McMaster died. Any change to the reporting rule the State Auditor recommended in 2022 would require action by the Legislature.
The Sheriff’s Office, through Sgt. Morales; the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office; the office of Supervisor David Haubert, whose district includes Dublin; Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld; and Hadar Aviram, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies criminal justice, did not respond to requests for comment sent Sunday.
Desmond Akers covers the cities and counties of the greater Bay Area, from Oakland and San Jose to the Peninsula, the North Bay and the East Bay suburbs, for Around the Region. More from Desmond Akers
