‘I need to know what happened to my son’: Inmate dies weeks after beating in Sacramento jail

After Antonio Lamar Thomas was attacked in his cell, allegedly by his cellmate, at the Sacramento County Main Jail on Dec. 10, 2019, he slipped into a coma for 42 days. While he remained unresponsive, his mother, father and family were constantly at his hospital bedside.

His mother, Anita Thomas of Citrus Heights, said she held the hand of her first-born son, touching his hair, knowing that in wakefulness he would never let her exercise that moment of motherly affection. He did his hair by himself and was very particular about it, she said

And while he lived a lifetime struggling with mental illness, “he was really independent with himself like that” and didn’t want anyone to mess his hair up, Anita Thomas said in an interview with The Bee.

“I’m just talking to him ... feeling like he can hear me and he’s just going to come through this,” she said sitting in the home she shared with him. “(I) just talk to him normal, like mess with his hair and I tell him I want him to get up. Just keep on talking to him.”

Antonio Thomas, 39, died at 5:12 a.m. Tuesday, two days after his parents had authorized a halt to the use of artificial respirators that had been keeping him alive at the UC Davis Medical Center.

It was a decision his family knew was coming and had struggled with for weeks.

“It was just time,” his mother said hours after her oldest son was pronounced dead at the hospital. “It’s really hard to let go. … They said there’s no hope. He has no brain activity.”

He is survived by his parents, two daughters, and a 3-year-old grandson.

Anita Thomas still doesn’t know what happened to her son inside the jail, where he had been held for three days for failing to check in with his probation officer, a violation that she believes stemmed from his mental illnesses. Thomas, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had been in jail many times before and was typically held in a medical unit because of his condition, she said.

But Thomas’ death — the 10th to occur inside the county’s jails over the past 12 months — has renewed questions about how the county lockups in downtown Sacramento and Elk Grove are operated and whether inmates there are properly supervised.

Throughout California, jails have been struggling with an influx of inmates because of a 2011 law that shifted thousands of prisoners from the state’s overcrowded prisons and into county jails. Some jails have failed to adequately monitor inmates, including putting mentally ill prisoners in with the general population.

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones and his deputies also are facing new scrutiny following claims by inmates that they were beaten by deputies, pepper sprayed without cause or otherwise abused. Although some deputies were found to have acted improperly and faced discipline, none were fired.

Anita Thomas and her attorney, Mark Merin, believe Antonio Thomas was placed in a cell with a suspect charged in a murder case in a move that sheriff’s officials have yet to explain and had not previously disclosed.

“Sheriff’s personnel at the Sacramento County Jail failed to discharge their duty to keep the vulnerable Mr. Thomas safe and were deliberately indifferent to his mental health needs, placing him in a dangerous situation as a cellmate to a known violent offender,” according to a claim Merin filed with the county Tuesday as a precursor to a lawsuit.

Merin alleges deputies delayed coming to Antonio Thomas’ aid “until he had suffered grievous injury, and claims they delayed medical aid after he was pulled from the cell for a “period of time during which CPR would have saved Mr. Thomas from being brain dead.

Sgt. Tess Deterding, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, confirmed Thomas’ cellmate is under investigation.

“Our evidence suggests there was a physical altercation in the cell between Mr. Thomas and his cellmate, who is still in custody,” she said. “... When deputies arrived at the cell, Mr. Thomas was unresponsive.”

She said detectives would present their investigation to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office in the coming week and in the event charges are filed —which she said is “highly likely” — the sheriff’s office will release the cellmate’s identity along with what they believed led up to the fight.

‘They had no answers for me’

In early January, Anita Thomas said sheriff’s officials had provided little information about what happened to her son, calling her after the attack to get her address and telling her, “Nobody’s hurt, nobody’s in trouble.”

In December, when sheriff’s officials arrived at the Citrus Heights home she shared with her son, they had a different story, she said.

“ ’I’m sorry, but your son is at UC Davis Medical Center,’ ” she said a detective told her. “ ’He was found unresponsive in his jail cell and we don’t know whether he had an altercation with a cellmate or he had a seizure.’ And he asked me, ‘Did my son have seizures?’ And I said no ...

“And he said, ‘I want you to be aware that I was informed by UC Davis, one of the nurses, that he has no brain activity.’ And that’s when I kind of ... lost it.”

Thomas said her son was no stranger to law enforcement. He’d lived with the knowledge of his diagnosis since he was a teenager and had been on medication for the majority of his life. Still, he had been in and out of jail for a litany of issues including probation violations.

Court records indicate Antonio Thomas has a criminal history beginning in 1999, with a litany of misdemeanor cases including loitering and defrauding an innkeeper. But in 2001, when he was in his 20s, Antonio Thomas was sentenced to four years in state prison for assault with a deadly weapon. During the proceedings, he was found to be incompetent by a court-appointed doctor and spent a four-month stint in a state hospital.

“And a lot of times Antonio, when he would get out of control with himself, he would call the police himself for a ride to the hospital or whatever,” she said.

During the times he was in jail, Thomas said she would go to visit him and he was often kept on the medical floor or put in the mental health unit.

This time, she said, Antonio had been brain dead for nearly 24 hours before she was notified of the incident in the jail by the sheriff’s office.

At the hospital, “I see my son laying there with tubes all through him. So I just was trying to question the nurses. They had no answers for me. They just know he was brought in through the police and that was it. And that’s where I’ve been at.”

Another month passed before Thomas was able to get additional information, she said.

Sheriff’s officials invited her and Antonio’s father, Anthony Wallace, on Jan. 9 to come to their offices on Auburn Boulevard, where they were allowed to review redacted video from the jail that included footage of Antonio entering his cell carrying a food tray, then showed inmates stopping outside it to look inside at something happening, they said.

They never saw footage from inside the cell and weren’t allowed to have copies of the video or even take notes about what they saw, his parents told The Sacramento Bee that day after emerging from the hourlong meeting.

Investigators did not say what transpired in the cell, Thomas said, and a detective said to her they were hoping to get a statement from Antonio to figure that out.

Their attorney, who has handled numerous lawsuits against the department alleging abuse inside the jail, was not allowed in with them, but instead was left to wait in the lobby.

“Of course, the critical thing for us is, how could they take someone they knew to be mentally ill who had been jailed at that Sacramento facility before and placed in the medical ward and given proper attention ... and then stick him with somebody who was charged with murder,” Merin said. “You’re supposed to be protected in jail, not killed.”

Similar death happened months before

The Thomas case is similar to another Merin is handling. In that case, 33-year-old Bryan Debbs was part-way through a six-month sentence for public intoxication and resisting arrest when he became involved in a fight with a fellow inmate and was taken to Sutter Medical Center on July 8.

Debbs never recovered and died at the hospital Aug. 3, according to the coroner. Sheriff’s officials did not reveal that an inmate had been hospitalized from a fight — or that he had later died — until The Bee began asking questions about his death.

Sheriff’s officials subsequently said they charged inmate Christian David Ento with murder in the death.

“Right now, I just cannot imagine not having my son around,” Thomas said. “It’s really hard to say what’s going to happen next. And it’s really hard not knowing what happened to him.”

Although he oftentimes isolated himself during the depressive episodes that are characteristic of bipolar disorder, his family described him as very “lovable” and “caring.” He loved to write and would listen to music from morning until night, his mother said. He was a die-hard fan of Mozzy, a rapper who has roots in Oak Park. And he loved his mom’s fried chicken and greens.

He kept in regular communication with his mother so she’d know he was OK, calling her multiple times a day, she said. But now she misses his voice.

“I’m very exhausted,” she said. “You know, just seeing my son in the hospital like that, and just not able to hear his voice. ... Yeah, I’m over-exhausted ... because I need to know what happened to my son. Who did this to my son? What happened to him?

“Those are the answers that I’m looking for and I won’t stop until I get them.”

This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 7:41 AM.