$11.75 Million Settlement After Jail Deputies Saw an Unconscious, Beaten 18-Year-Old on Two Walkthroughs and Kept Walking

Brian Ortiz was 18 years old and being held at Maricopa County's Fourth Avenue Jail in Phoenix in May 2020, jailed over a probation violation for failing to pay a fine. On the morning of May 26, 2020, at 7:41 a.m., another inmate in the jail's maximum-security unit, Xavier Fregoso, called Ortiz into his cell. Fregoso then punched, kicked, and stomped on Ortiz's head, face, and groin nearly 50 times.

What turned the case into an $11.75 million settlement was not only the beating, but what jail staff did, and did not do, afterward. Deputies conducted routine walkthroughs of the unit. On the first two passes after the assault, according to the lawsuit, deputies looked into Ortiz's cell and saw him lying unconscious in his bed. Neither stopped to check on him. It was not until a third walkthrough, at 9:15 a.m., during a separate round of medical checks, that officers finally noticed something was seriously wrong and raised the alarm.

By then Ortiz had been unconscious for more than 90 minutes. He was seizing and bleeding from his head. Even then, the lawsuit alleged, deputies did not move straight to emergency care. Officers first restrained him, placing chains on his legs and a belly chain around his midsection, before carrying him to the jail's clinic. An ambulance did not arrive to take him to a hospital until 9:55 a.m., roughly two hours and fifteen minutes after Fregoso attacked him.

The delay had consequences that could not be undone. Ortiz had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. He remained comatose for more than two months. When he eventually regained consciousness, he had been left permanently incompetent, unable to manage his own affairs, and in need of lifelong care.

Ortiz's mother, Selene Ortiz, sued Maricopa County, Sheriff Paul Penzone, and jail staff in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on her son's behalf, alleging the county failed to protect him from a foreseeable assault in a maximum-security unit and then failed to provide timely medical care once he was found. Represented by Charles "Tony" Piccuta of Scottsdale Injury Lawyers, the family argued that the two walkthroughs where deputies saw an unconscious inmate and moved on, and the decision to shackle a seizing, bleeding young man before calling for an ambulance, showed indifference to Ortiz's medical needs at exactly the moments it mattered most.

Maricopa County and its insurer settled the case on March 31, 2022, for $11.75 million, reported to be the largest amount the county had ever paid to resolve a single jail-related injury claim. The settlement did not require the county to admit wrongdoing, and no jury weighed in on whether the deputies' conduct met the legal standard for a civil rights violation. But the size of the payout, for a young man jailed over an unpaid fine who emerged from custody permanently disabled, reflected how difficult that question would have been for the county to win in front of a jury.