16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY september 14-20, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com New documents reveal how Monterey County Jail and prison health care contractor Wellpath are still failing incarcerated people. By Rey Mashayekhi The Jail Files Soon after being booked into Monterey County Jail in February, Erick Stewart struck up a friendship with fellow inmate James Hall. The angle of their respective cells meant that they could see and talk to each other regularly—an opportunity they used to study the Bible together. They would also discuss Hall’s health problems, as Hall had trouble breathing at night and usually relied on a CPAP machine when sleeping. But when Hall was brought to the Salinas facility, his CPAP machine did not transfer with him, and his appeals to the jail’s staff for such a device were ignored, he told Stewart. “When we talked in the housing unit, he told me multiple times that he wakes up in the middle of the night gasping for air,” Stewart recounted in a court affidavit. On the morning of April 7, 2023, Hall told Stewart that he had again woken up the night before as though he were suffocating, and “felt that he almost died.” Hall wasn’t scheduled to be let out to the jail’s dayroom, where he could access a phone and call a lawyer, until 5pm that day, so he asked Stewart to do so for him. But later that afternoon, Stewart suddenly heard a commotion. “I heard people yelling ‘Man down,’ because they saw that Mr. Hall collapsed on the floor in his cell,” Stewart recalled. Deputies soon arrived, pulled Hall out of his cell and began chest compressions. “When they first pushed on his chest, it looked like the entire contents of Mr. Hall’s stomach came out of his mouth. But Mr. Hall was otherwise not responsive.” Jail nurses and then paramedics subsequently arrived, and worked to resuscitate Hall while placing him on a stretcher and carrying him away. Stewart later got confirmation that Hall, 39, had died when jail staff returned to take his belongings from his cell. (Though lawyers for the jail would later claim Hall died of a drug overdose, Stewart testified that Hall had never mentioned “anything about having access to drugs” to him, nor did he see any jail personnel administer Narcan anti-overdose medication to Hall.) “Since that day, I have even experienced physical pain in the form of a headache and stomach ache when I think about Mr. Hall,” Stewart testified. “I feel angry and also helpless because Mr. Hall needed medical attention and was asking staff for help, but they never gave him his CPAP machine. “The medical and mental health treatment that I and others have Daniel Dreifuss
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