COMPTON, California – The man in the suit arrived in an unmarked car on a spring morning in 2020 with the worst news James Brown had ever heard.
His 30-year-old son Jamall was dead.
Brown hadn't heard from him in the days since he was detained on a parole violation. The man – a Los Angeles County deputy sent to notify Brown for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department – would only say that Jamall had been found unresponsive in a jail cell.
"It hit me like a hammer," Brown, 77, said recently. "How did he just die?"
For five years, asdetainee after detainee died in the custody of Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco's jails, Brown kept asking that question.
Finally, in 2025, with the help of a reporter from the Desert Sun, a member of the USA TODAY Network, Brown began turning up answers.
First came the official answer, in a report released from Bianco's coroner's office: Jamall had refused treatment for his diabetes for days, the report said. He died from diabetic complications after or during a methamphetamine overdose.
But a trove of unreleased jailhouse video and detailed internal investigative reports that current and former sheriff's employees provided to Brown and the Desert Sun told a different story.
Those reports confirm that Jamall died of diabetic complications. But they indicate it wasn't because he was rejecting medical aid. The records and video say deputies and nurses ignored Jamall and failed to provide insulin to him for nearly two days. The jail's cameras recorded him saying he was afraid he was dying. They recorded him slipping into a coma in a pile of trash on the floor of his two-man cell. They recorded deputies and nurses looking at him while he lay unconscious, but not intervening. The reports said investigators found no drugs or evidence of them in the cell after his death.
Investigators had collected evidence of the staff's failures within hours of Jamall Brown's death, the documents indicated. But for five years, no one told Brown.
Sheriff Chad Bianco and the department's media team didn't respond to requests for comment, including detailed questions about the findings reported in this story, including those in a 6-page administrative review that detailed deputies' failings in Jamall Brown's death.
James Brown says the sheriff's department has been hiding the truth about his son's death.
"My son left this life in agony," he said. "Just because you arrested someone doesn't give you the right to watch them die. I'm still shocked that a cover-up like this is possible."
The pain of living without a son
James Brown served as a military policeman in the Marine Corps and as president of the union that represents workers at the Compton Municipal Water Department, where he worked for about 30 years. He's retired now, but said seeking the truth behind his son's death from the Riverside County Sheriff's Office felt like a full-time job.
In a pile of Father's Day cards he keeps beside his favorite recliner in his Compton home is one Jamall wrote to him in 2018: "Being a father is more than just paying bills and putting food on the table. Once you have the responsibility, you are obliged to help nurture, guide and be a willing participant in every aspect of that child's life and you've been all that plus more for me."
Jamall concluded the greeting card message saying he couldn't imagine life without his father. Two years later, Brown faced the pain of living without his son.
Jamall had been arrested several times while growing up in Compton, a city just south of Los Angeles, and had completed a prison sentence for assault. His father said he was laboring to get his life back on track while living in a tough neighborhood that could easily derail him.
In spring 2020, Jamall travelled about 65 miles east to Moreno Valley, a large suburb in Riverside County, to be near a woman he was dating. His father was not confident Jamall had a steady place to stay and wasn't surprised when he got a call from him. Jamall asked if his dad could send him some money so he could get back to Compton to meet with his parole officer.
Later that evening, Brown heard his wife pick up the phone. Jamall had been arrested and she asked if he wanted to talk to him. Frustrated, Brown declined, assuming his son would be released in a couple of days.
A police report showed that a deputy patrolling a shopping center saw a man pushing a shopping cart with a suitcase in it. The deputy asked him if he was on probation. Parole, Jamall said.
The deputy searched Jamall and his belongings, finding insulin in his luggage and two ecstasy pills in his pocket.
"During my entire interaction with Brown, I did not notice any unusual behavior," the deputy wrote. "I instructed Brown to tell the nurse at the jail he was diabetic and insulin dependent. Brown stated he understood and would tell nursing staff."
Deaths in custody surge
About two years after Jamall Brown died, deaths in custody began to surge in Bianco's department. There were 19 in 2022 alone. An investigation by The Desert Sun and The New York Times of video and internal reports found thatdeputies had ignored detainees leading up to their deaths by suicide. The county's jails also had thehighest rate of homicide in the state. At one facility three people were killed by other detainees in a matter of four months. Evidence gathered by department investigators showed that deputies at that jail had not been properly trained to do mandatory security checks.
Public scrutiny mounted when a former jail captain sued the department, saying Bianco had pressured her not to participate in a civil grand jury investigation of jail conditions and retaliated against jail staff who spoke out about misconduct.
The video and internal reports of Jamall Brown's death, recently leaked to James Brown and The Desert Sun, provide the earliest evidence of the same deputy failures and policy violations amid the recent surge in deaths in the county jails.
Internal documents show the jail's medical staff recorded that Jamall Brown was diabetic, insulin-dependent and required blood sugar monitoring. When he was booked, he did not appear under the influence and answered questions coherently, although he mentioned he suspected he might have a mental illness and was noted as a detainee who required extra monitoring.
He spent his first night in custody at the county's central jail in Riverside, where investigators later wrote he was seen eating, sleeping and acting ordinarily.
Transferred to the county's jail in Banning, he was placed in a cell with a camera constantly recording audio and video. A Desert Sun reporter obtained an hour of clips of the video, which recorded Jamall Brown's cell constantly from the evening of March 14, 2020, to the morning of March 16, 2020. According to the video clips and a deputy's detailed written description of all 40 hours of footage, Brown never received treatment for his diabetes during the time he was at the Banning facility.
Internal records show that soon after Jamall Brown was taken to the hospital in cardiac arrest, the department's investigators began processing about three days of video evidence that captured him losing consciousness as his blood sugar spiked and his heart stopped on the concrete floor.
In jail, Brown died of a medical condition that he had been adequately treating even while unhoused in the days prior to his arrest – a fact department investigators discovered the same day he died.
March 14-15, 2020: First night in jail
On his first night at the Banning jail, video shows that on two occasions a deputy and a nurse opened a pill slot but closed it without speaking with Jamall Brown. Yet they recorded in documents repeatedly during his stay that he had refused medical care.
At 2 a.m., after hours with little food and no medication, the camera captured Brown rubbing his stomach and moaning. He walked unsteadily to the cell's toilet, bumping into the side of the bunk, and drank water before lying down.
A deputy walked by his cell, glancing in through the window before walking away. Minutes later, a deputy is heard on the cell's intercom calling his name and asking: "Do you want your diabetic check?" When Brown didn't answer, the deputy can be heard on video saying, "I'll take your silence as a no."
Exhaustion is a symptom that the body is slipping into diabetic ketoacidosis, as is increased thirst, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A type one diabetic, like Jamall Brown, can begin experiencing this life-threatening condition after as little as 12 hours without insulin.
Jamall Brown didn't stir when the lights turned on the next morning and breakfast was served. Hours later, he woke up confused about what time it was, saying he didn't think the door ever opened.
"Tell 'em I'm dyin', cellie," he said to his cellmate. "Please. Tell 'em I'm diabetic."
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A deputy approached the cell, shining a light inside before walking away without interacting with Jamall Brown as he lay on his bunk.
"My stomach hurts bad," he is recorded saying at about 6 a.m. "You want me to die on you?" he said with a groan. "Please, somebody please," he pleaded. No deputy responded through the cell's intercom and his cellmate told him to be quiet.
March 15, 2020: Second day in jail
On his second day in jail without medication, Jamall Brown got off his bunk and attempted to walk around, appearing dizzy.
"Something's wrong," he's recorded on camera saying. Soon after, he can be seen losing his balance, falling against the wall and sliding down.
Over the next several hours, the camera captured Jamall Brown attempting to lift himself up but falling partially into the cell's toilet. He rolled under a table and fell again near a stool. When his cellmate brought in two lunch trays, Brown didn't respond.
Meanwhile, deputies proceeded with the jail's schedule as if nothing was happening. Several deputies walked by, asking if Brown was OK. A few times, Brown's cellmate responded, once saying, "Yeah, he's all right" and another time saying, "He's down and out, fool." Still, deputies left without helping.
March 15-16, 2020: Second night in jail
Jamall Brown spent his entire second night on the floor with labored breathing and minimal movement. At around 2 a.m., on March 16, a deputy used the cell's intercom to ask, remotely: "Brown, do you want to see medical?" He repeated it several times, urging him to respond while Brown didn't appear to move.
"No," his cellmate said.
"All right, thank you," the deputy said. Officials noted that exchange in jail records, saying Jamall Brown refused a diabetic check, though he had not said a word.
For the next seven hours, three more deputies walked past the cell multiple times without looking at or speaking with Jamall Brown, who was now virtually motionless on the floor. Internal reports and video show deputies passing the cell 33 times. Sometimes staff tried to speak to Brown and got no response. Other times they didn't stop at all.
"All inmates were breathing and accounted for," one deputy wrote of a 6:30 a.m. security check. At this point Jamall Brown had been on the ground for about 24 hours. He had been without insulin for far longer. An hour later, the same deputy added: "Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary."
Finally, another hour later, the same deputy and a nurse noticed Brown wasn't breathing.
Aftermath of a jail death
Within three hours of Jamall Brown's death, an internal-affairs sergeant was writing a different version of what had happened.
"Inmate Brown was type-1 diabetic and had refused all medication for several days," wrote John Lenton, a sergeant at the Professional Standards Bureau, which conducts internal affairs investigations. "He was being monitored by jail medical staff in regard to his meds refusal."
In a coroner's report completed months later in September 2020, Assistant Coroner Aimee Roberts repeated that Jamall Brown had refused treatment for his diabetes and added that he had also overdosed on methamphetamine. Though cameras showed Brown collapsing on the floor, Roberts wrote instead that he was "making strange movements" such as doing "head stands" against the wall.
Of hours of video reviewed for this story, the only thing resembling a head stand is when Jamall Brown fell against the wall at an awkward angle.
Dr. Alex Charmoz, the emergency room doctor who handled Jamall Brown's case, reported jail staff told him Brown had been acting "bizarre" and was "shaky or twitchy" before he was brought to the hospital without a pulse. Charmoz said he was told he'd declined treatment for his diabetes. Charmoz wrote that his blood sugar was at 1,111 — more than 10 times the ordinary level — and that resulting diabetic complications had killed him. Charmoz did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
In 2025, James Brown received hundreds of pages of sheriff's department reports and video clips capturing his son's final days, materials that were also provided to The Desert Sun.
The reports reveal that, within days of his death, department administrators had collected a highly detailed account of how Jamall Brown was neglected. On March 18, 2020, a deputy completed a 38-page report summarizing the video footage showing him in his cell at the jail, including minute-by-minute descriptions of each of his movements as he lay dying on the cell floor. The department declined to release this report to The Desert Sun but did not dispute its authenticity.
"I want the public to know what really happened to my son," James Brown said. "These reports and video tell a completely different story than what they were trying to sell to me. They had the audacity to let someone die right in front of their eyes."
About a month after Jamall Brown died, Sgt. Marcus Schultz wrote an internal administrative report based on the jail cell video. He found that deputies had failed to perform security checks, monitor the camera as it captured an "inmate who was in medical distress," and inaccurately interpreted the dying man's inability to speak "as a refusal for medical care."
"The proper performance of fundamental, daily responsibilities could have possibly prevented inmate Brown's death," Schultz wrote.
His report was among the documents leaked to James Brown and The Desert Sun.
None of these findings were reported to the public, mentioned in the coroner report or reflected in the department's report on the death to state regulators.
Another of Schultz's findings excluded from the public reports directly contradicts the department's death ruling: The emergency room doctor noted that the level of methamphetamine found in Jamall Brown's system was not reliable evidence that he had used the drug in jail or that he'd suffered an overdose.
"Due to limitations of the test, medical staff were unable to determine the amount of methamphetamine in Brown's system and were, therefore, unable to determine when he last used methamphetamine," Schultz wrote. His report does not state that methamphetamine had anything to do with Brown's death. It said there was no medical evidence to indicate he was a chronic drug user.
Department officials did not respond to questions about the discrepancy in these reports.
In the aftermath of Jamall Brown's death, Schultz noted, administrators began working to address insufficient security checks. Medical staff were ordered to make sure all refusals of medical treatment were made directly to them and documented.
"No longer will an attempted intercom communication be acceptable," he wrote.
A total of 10 deputies and three nurses failed to intervene when Jamall Brown was having a medical emergency over about two days in 2020. Employment records from 2023 show that all but two deputies captured by the cameras still worked for the department. The department did not respond to questions about the eight deputies are still employed.
Included in the leaked reports is Jamall Brown's death review presentation, which is supposed to be completed within 30 days of a death. It closely reflects what is captured in the video and in the leaked internal incident reports. The presentation does not state that Jamall Brown used drugs while in jail or that he died of an overdose.
While James Brown long ago accepted he'll never see his son again, learning the details of his mistreatment in the care of Riverside county officials has inflicted on him a new kind of pain. He said he sometimes has trouble sleeping when he imagines what his son experienced in his final moments. As he learned more and more disturbing details, he kept fighting to learn the truth. Not just for Jamall's memory, he said, but for all the other people who've had relatives die in the county's jails in the years since.
He said he'll continue to fight for transparency from the department in light of the video and reports he now has. He said the deputies and nurses that let this happen to Jamall need to be held accountable. And he hopes the department will implement real change that puts an end to similar deaths due to neglect.
"This is all a cover up," James Brown said. "They let my son die. They lied about it. It's hurt me to my heart."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Jail documents reveal how a son died on the floor, pleading for help
COMPTON, California – The man in the suit arrived in an unmarked car on a spring morning in 2020 with the worst news Jam...
