Four children file lawsuit after their mother dies at Sacramento County Jail
Four children have filed a lawsuit against the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office after their mother died last year after becoming unconscious at the downtown jail.
Katrina Zanea Lee Yates, 32, was booked at the Sacramento County Main Jail on April 23, 2025, on suspicion of drug and theft related charges.
During the booking process, Yates told staff she had a history of methamphetamine and fentanyl use, alleged the lawsuit, filed June 29 in federal court. Even though Yates told staff of her drug use history, staff placed her in a cell where she would not be monitored for withdrawals or overdoses, the suit alleged.
That night at about 10:20 p.m., jail staff found Yates unresponsive in her cell, the suit alleged. They transported her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead at 11:15 p.m.
Her cause of death was fentanyl and methamphetamine toxicity, according to the coroner’s death report.
In addition to the Sheriff’s Office, the lawsuit also names Sheriff Jim Cooper and Sacramento County as defendants. Sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Edward Igoe did not respond to an email seeking comment on the lawsuit. County spokesperson Kim Nava did not immediately provide comment.
The wrongful death suit claims violations of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, regarding failure to protect from harm and failure to provide medical care. It also claims medical malpractice, as well as violations of a state law that requires public employees who know an inmate needs immediate medical attention to take reasonable action to provide it.
The day she died, Yates had been booked into the jail on suspicion of felony theft and drug possession misdemeanors, according to Sheriff’s Office booking records.
The suit was filed on behalf of Yates’ children, who are ages 1, 2, 12 and 14, said Denisse Gastelum, their attorney.
“Katrina’s children were the center of her world,” Gastelum said. “Everything she did was driven by her desire to protect and provide for them.”
Gastelum said Yates’ family hopes that the civil case will reveal details about how and why Yates died.
“It was apparent she was under a medical emergency and the custody and medical staff failed in their duties to attend to that medical emergency and because of those failures she died,” Gastelum said. “And because of that we now have four young kids without a mother.”
Since 2020, the county has been under a consent decree, called the Mays Consent Decree, as a result of the 2019 class action lawsuit. That decree outlines a list of requirements for the jail to improve medical and mental health care for inmates.
About two months after Yates’ death, Dr. Thomas Bzoskie, started work as the jail’s new medical director. A July 29, 2025, independent court-ordered jail monitoring report praised the changes Bzoskie had made aimed to reduce inmate overdose deaths. There was a jail overdose death Aug. 18, 2025, but there have been none so far in 2026.
Senate Bill 519 requires law enforcement agencies to publish records, video and audio files for the public regarding deaths that occur in law enforcement custody, including jail deaths.
The Sacramento Bee in February filed a Public Records Act for all materials that the bill requires to be released, including the Yates death, from Jan. 1, 2024, to present. In response, the office did not release any materials that were not already on its transparency web page. That includes nothing for the Yates incident.
As with all deaths in custody, the District Attorney’s Office is investigating the incident to determine whether it will criminally charge any of the deputies involved. The office has not yet released the results of that investigation.
The Bee’s Ariane Lange contributed to this report.
