After an epidemic of jail deaths, this CA sheriff is running for governor Christopher Damien, USA TODAYSeptember 19, 2025 at 4:05 AM 0 A sheriff who is a leading candidate for governor of California hid the causes of a mounting epidemic of jail deaths behind a culture of coverup and retaliation, a f...
- - After an epidemic of jail deaths, this CA sheriff is running for governor
Christopher Damien, USA TODAYSeptember 19, 2025 at 4:05 AM
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A sheriff who is a leading candidate for governor of California hid the causes of a mounting epidemic of jail deaths behind a culture of cover-up and retaliation, a former captain in the department said in her first interview since she filed a lawsuit outlining her claims. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco ordered Captain Victoria Flores not to answer questions from a civil grand jury investigating jail conditions, Flores alleges. Another of her bosses told her not to leave a paper trail about a detainee's overdose. And the department didn't discipline deputies who were captured on video knocking a man unconscious. Those are just some of the claims Flores, a 30-year veteran of the department, made in a July lawsuit and in an exclusive interview with The Desert Sun, a member of the USA TODAY Network. Her allegations support previous reporting by The Desert Sun and The New York Times that Bianco's cost-cutting left the jails understaffed with inexperienced guards as they became among the deadliest large jails in the nation. And they come as Bianco steps onto a wider political stage with a run for governor in the nation's most populous state. "The inmates in the county's detention facilities were being abused," Flores said, "and the abuse was covered up without proper discipline."
Victoria Flores, a former Captain with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, is interviewed about her lawsuit, which alleges Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco created a culture of cover-up and retaliation to hide the reasons behind a surge in in-custody deaths in the department's jails.
Flores charges in her lawsuit that Bianco fired her in 2024 in retaliation for conflicts she had with the sheriff's administration, including her unwillingness to remain quiet over staff and policy failures related to the deaths. Bianco has repeatedly said that there have been no allegations of misconduct related to deaths in the county's five jails and that any controversy is manufactured by his political enemies. But the surge in deaths triggered an ongoing civil rights investigation of his office by the California Department of Justice. More than a dozen families have sued the sheriff over wrongful deaths in the jail. Several have resolved in settlements totaling more than $13 million, and the rest remain pending. In an interview, Flores specifically cited the death of Alicia Upton, a 21-year-old woman facing a misdemeanor charge, who died by suicide as surveillance video recorded that jail staff ignored her attempts to contact them in 2022. Upton was one of 19 inmates to die that year. Two years after her daughter's death, Upton's mother learned from a reporter the basic details of her final moments. The department hasn't released more than a summary report to the public or the family. Flores said she can't provide more details now because she could be called to testify in the lawsuit Upton's family filed against Bianco, the county and Flores, who was captain at the jail when Upton died. "The lack of information given to the family about Alicia Upton's death is one of the reasons why I came forward," Flores said. "All these families deserve respect. Bianco's callousness is appalling. There's absolutely no personal responsibility. You can't continue to blame families because they want answers."
More: An at-risk inmate committed suicide on video. But jail guards weren't watching
The department's attorneys have disputed the claims made by Nichole Thompson, Upton's mother, in the civil suit and the case remains unresolved. The department and the county did not respond to requests for comment on Flores' suit. Her suit was filed publicly but later sealed by a judge. It is unclear whether the county filed an official response to the lawsuit after it was sealed.
'Too much too fast'
Bianco has served seven years as sheriff of Riverside County, which is home to more than 2.4 million people and sprawls from the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles to the Arizona border in an area nearly the size of New Jersey. He manages five jails and a staff of 1,700 sworn deputies and 2,400 civilians. Bianco promoted Flores in 2021 to lead the central jail, the Robert Presley Detention Center in Downtown Riverside. She had spent more than two decades working in the jails, often directly with detainees, and on assignments developing the department's jail policies. She advised on new protections against rape and policies for managing state sentencing reforms that ballooned the jails' population. The county's five jails house an average of 3,500 people and routinely release some to address jail overcrowding.
Chad Bianco, who is both sheriff and coroner in Riverside County, has defended his department and criticized the state attorney general's investigation into jail deaths.
But she told The Desert Sun the jails changed rapidly after Bianco took office, with a revolving door of staff changes, including firing leaders from the former sheriff's administration. Bianco also established a culture of retaliation against anyone who questioned his leadership, she said in her lawsuit. "We generally had the right practices and procedures," Flores said. "If we followed them, we didn't have anything to worry about. But what I started seeing was too much change, too fast." Now 50, Flores was 20 years old, newly married and weighed "all of a buck-o-five," when she joined the sheriff's department as a correctional officer. As a young recruit in the wake of the Rodney King beating, she learned quickly that departments were under intense scrutiny and Southern California communities demanded ethical policing. "It was very simple," she said. "The expectation was to do what was right." But that's not what she says she saw from Bianco.
In a bid to cut costs, the new sheriff rapidly replaced experienced deputies with younger deputies who were often tasked with supervising each other, she said. The Desert Sun reported on the shift earlier this year in an investigation supported by The New York Times finding that younger deputies who had about half the training replaced those who had previously worked in the jails. Then the pandemic hit. One correctional deputy died from the COVID-19 virus. Staffing plummeted amid the pandemic's pressures. "Too much, too fast," Flores kept repeating, as people she worked with expressed worries about the changes. "The age and experience level of the average deputy was concerning everybody," she said. "We spoke about it constantly in management meetings. We were asking too much of them." Emotions flared as overwork pushed the staff to the brink.
Victoria Flores looks at a photograph of herself when she was a captain with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department during an interview.
In her lawsuit against Bianco, Flores describes reviewing video of a verbal confrontation between deputies and a man. The deputies eventually fought with the man and hurled him against a jail wall with enough force to knock him out. In her suit, she says she saw the deputies on the video using excessive force. But an internal affairs investigation found no violations. "When abuse is covered up without proper discipline, that's how you establish the wrong kind of culture," she told The Desert Sun. "The employees see that this person got in this situation and there was not the proper follow-up."
Three homicides in four months
Under Bianco, Riverside County's Jails tallied three homicides in a matter of just four months spanning 2022 and 2023. But the department only officially reported two of them. In all three cases, The Desert Sun and The New York Times reviewed department investigation reports, photography and some related videos to determine what happened. In one, a deputy remotely opened the cell door instead of physically intervening during the violent attack of a newly jailed man by his cellmate. The attacker picked up the much smaller man and threw him over the jail's second story rail. He later died of his injuries. In another, a man awaiting trial on a violent sexual assault case was housed with a person transitioning gender to female. He strangled her to death in what he later told detectives was a fit of annoyance. In the third, a man stabbed his cell mate multiple times and attempted to hide his body under a sheet. Both were found to have been drinking. A deputy who was 97 minutes late for a security check found the attacker as he was attempting to clean blood from the cell. But even though detainee Erik Martinez pleaded guilty to the murder, Bianco's department did not list his victim among the homicides. It took an investigation by The Desert Sun and The New York Times, to finally officially identify Ulysses Munoz-Ayala as having been murdered. The deputy who arrived late was cleared of any wrongdoing, according to a department report, because internal affairs investigators found that the majority of deputies at that jail had been trained incorrectly on when to do legally required security checks. "When you don't address a problem of training or misconduct, you can expect it to happen again," Flores said. The grand jury released a report in May 2025 confirming the findings by The Desert Sun and The New York Times about another murder in 2024. In that incident, the grand jury found staff incorrectly identified a man with a violent criminal history and placed him in a vocational program with no guards, where he stabbed and killed another detainee with a screwdriver.
More: How repeated security failures at Riverside County jails contributed to high murder rate
During the grand jury investigation of the county's jail deaths, Flores alleges in her lawsuit, jurors requested to speak with her. But she says Bianco told her to call out sick so she couldn't speak with the jury. Afraid of retaliation if she didn't do what Bianco asked, she decided to take a vacation day. "The only person that asked me to lie my whole time with the department was Bianco," she said. "If the jurors can't pull witnesses, they can't do their job." The civil grand jury submitted its findings to the county's Board of Supervisors. The department's undersheriff accepted most of the findings and said the department has implemented changes to address them, including the repair of a broken fingerprint machine used to accurately identify people who are arrested.
Drug overdoses and deaths
As deaths from drug overdoses spiked, Flores suspected that someone on the staff was trafficking fentanyl. Then in late 2023 a deputy who drove inmates to court dates and other appointments was arrested by fellow deputies after a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation. He was charged, and later convicted, after he was caught with 100 pounds of fentanyl in his trunk while he was off duty. The official line from the department was that there is no evidence that the deputy – or any other – dealt drugs in the jail, according to a department press release at the time. But the public never saw the evidence because the deputy pleaded guilty before trial. When a man held in the jail overdosed, Flores says in her lawsuit, her supervisor told her not to notify other jail leaders, which would have been standard practice. The man, who had survived, was instead quietly released later, with no paper trail documenting the health emergency, Flores contends.
Cindy Garcia Lance, from Blythe, Calif., left, takes a photo with Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco while attending former president Donald Trump's rally in Coachella, Calif., Oct. 12, 2024. his rally in Coachella, Calif., Oct. 12, 2024.
Drug overdoses and the deaths related to them are the fault of inmates who use and sell drugs in the jails, Bianco has said. Flores said as a jail leader she believed the department could have regained control of the situation if they had thoroughly investigated the deaths and were transparent with their findings. Instead, she felt the lack of accountability dangerously destabilized the operation. "When I saw that there was wrongdoing, because things weren't followed up with correctly, that's when the fear set in," she said.
'Don't embarrass the sheriff'
Rumors began to spread among the department in 2022 that Bianco planned to run for governor in 2026, according to several sources. The same year, the county's jails experienced the most in-custody deaths on record, 19, or more than double the average. The number of deaths has fallen since as scrutiny of the department has increased. As the deadliest year in the jails' history ended, families were publicly describing their struggle to learn basic information from Bianco's office about how their relatives had died. They were demanding an outside investigation. In 2023, the California Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. It continues today. "When the DOJ stepped in is when I really started to notice the cultural shift," Flores said. "The mantra was: 'We need to protect the sheriff.' 'Don't embarrass the sheriff.' He didn't want anything said that would draw outside attention." In internal meetings, Flores said, leaders urged top supervisors to maintain silence and rally around Bianco, who publicly mocked the investigation as a political stunt.
Victoria Flores is a former captain with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department who has filed a lawsuit claiming the department has not been honest about the surge in deaths in its jails. She described the department's culture of secrecy and retaliation during an interview.
"This investigation is based on nothing but false, misleading statements, and straight-out lies from activists, including their attorneys," Bianco said when the investigation was announced, referring to relatives of the dead as political advocates. Flores said that any internal echoes of the calls for accountability were swiftly countered. "When people pushed back, they were moved, transferred and fired," Flores said. "It wasn't difficult to conclude that they were targeted because of their resistance. There are people who work there right now who are absolutely miserable and in fear." Flores' suit says that jail staff were transferred to new facilities so they wouldn't be questioned about allegations of misconduct at their previous assignments. Department administrators implemented a policy to file criminal charges in every case in which there was a confrontation between deputies and detainees to make detainees' claims of abuse less credible, according to her suit. Flores and other jail leaders said the additional charges would keep detainees in jail longer and delay the resolution of their original cases. Most of those she worked with, she added, needed behavioral health treatment, not more jail time. When jail leaders dissented, they were transferred. "I made it very clear to the administration that I would not lie to the Department of Justice," Flores said. "I made it clear to my other bosses and the county's counsel that I would not lie. And that's when my life became a living hell." She was at the department's shooting range in November 2023 for a routine firearms qualification when a range employee reported that he saw her break safety and reporting rules. The allegations were false, Flores says in her lawsuit, a pretext to fire her. She was officially fired the following July.
'Right is right and wrong is wrong'
A year later, Bianco is an announced candidate for governor and Flores is speaking out. In her wrongful termination lawsuit against Bianco, Flores describes how many of the sheriff's employees were fired or charged with crimes while others were let off with little or no discipline. And she raises questions about department spending that she says benefitted Bianco and his political allies.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco takes the stage to announce his candidacy for Governor in Riverside, Calif., Feb. 17, 2025.
But she said she's most concerned with exposing abuses in the jail, many of which she witnessed firsthand. Bianco has repeatedly made public comments ridiculing the relatives of the dead. He has said the families should blame the drug use of their relatives and accused them of using the deaths to advance the agendas of his political opponents. "Did their parents ever demand they take responsibility for their own actions?" Bianco posted on social media in response to an article about relatives asking for outside investigations of each jail death. And when speaking in opposition to a failed motion for a civilian oversight board to review custody deaths in the county, he dismissed the relatives of the dead as being political pawns: "We are here because of a lie. A lie perpetuated by disingenuous politicians, activists, and complicit media that dismisses the truth for sensationalist headlines that divide us." Flores said instead of fighting them, she urges the department to sit down with families as soon as possible after the deaths of their relatives and tell them what happened. Forcing them to wait years to get the findings of investigations that are almost always verified by security camera footage is unacceptable, she said. "It's appalling, in my opinion, and it prolongs the family's suffering," said Flores. "Why should they have to fight and litigate just to find out the simple truth?" But change has been slow to come. After fierce opposition to the plan from Bianco, the county's elected board of supervisors recently rejected a proposal to establish civilian oversight of the department, which would have included an inspector general. Flores said she didn't previously support such a board but does now.
"With this current administration, it's necessary," Flores said. "The grand jury can serve its oversight role only when it's able to call all witnesses. In my opinion, the jury is rendered ineffective when the department makes witnesses unavailable."
While Flores is supported by The Signals Network, a whistleblower protection group, she said she's resigned herself to the fate of others who have similarly taken a public stand. She's ready for the attacks on her character, the same kind she said she has seen Bianco levy toward the families that have asked for oversight and transparency in the past.
"Whistleblowers are almost always vilified," she said. "But right is right, and wrong is wrong. What's been happening in that department for years is simply wrong."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sheriff covered up details as jail deaths mounted, lawsuit says
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