by Grace Deng, Washington State Standard
July 25, 2024
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
Family members of a man whose suicide went undiscovered in Garfield County’s jail for over 18 hours are calling for more oversight into local jails across Washington.
Kyle Lara’s parents settled a claim with the county, in an agreement approved by a state superior court judge on Monday. Garfield County has agreed to pay the Lara family $2.5 million, but Kyle Lara’s parents say the most important part of the agreement is the county’s pledge to keep its jail closed until it meets state and federal regulations.
“I believe if there was some kind of check and balance system — if the state even came in 10 years ago, and looked at this jail, [Kyle’s death] would have never happened,” said David Lara, Kyle Lara’s father.
Garfield County closed its jail in March 2023, shortly after the Laras first filed a claim, because its insurance company said “this is way too risky, people are going to die if they run the facility,” according to the Laras’ attorney, Ryan Dreveskracht.
“It wasn’t out of the love of the sheriff’s heart,” he said, although he added that “whatever their motives were, the county did the right thing.”
Garfield County now contracts with Walla Walla and Whitman county jails. The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. A call to the Garfield County Board of Commissioners went unanswered.
Washington lawmakers recently considered a bill to establish a new jail oversight agency, but it didn’t make it far during this year’s short legislative session. The legislation also came up against the “fear of what it will take” to renovate Washington’s aging and sometimes unsafe jails, said Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, who introduced the bill.
David Lara said that when he heard there wasn’t local or state oversight of the Garfield County jail, it was “unbelievable.”
“I was shocked, I was appalled, I was mad,” he said, adding: “Our state representatives in the area here too, where were all of them? No one came up to bat for us. Not one person.”
Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy — the Lara family’s local representative, who David Lara said “has a good heart” despite his frustration — told the Standard that she wasn’t able to speak with David Lara, who goes to her church, while the lawsuit was ongoing, but hopes to reconnect soon.
“We can’t be closely involved because of ethics rules when a person has a pending court case,” Dye said. “I think that [David] was hoping for some legislation. Now that the suit has been settled and everything, maybe we can review that and look at what would make the system in our state safer for people.”
“I’m sorry that we hadn’t had a chance to talk in a long time,” she said about David Lara.
Dye, at times getting emotional, agreed with the Lara family that Kyle Lara’s death impacted not just the family and their friends, but the whole community, as Pomeroy is a small town.
Saldaña said she was heartbroken to hear about Kyle Lara’s death, and the situation shows why it’s “critical that we don’t back down” and build the oversight agency, as well as a better system of mental health care in the state’s jails.
“I will definitely be reintroducing this [legislation],” she said. “We have many jails that should be closed. They were built without knowledge about behavioral health, mental illness…they were not built for addressing people in crisis.”
Saldaña said she was open to working with the Lara family’s local representatives on her legislation. Dye said she’s not committed to any one bill but “always open” to working with her colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Dye also pointed to bipartisan legislation she introduced to create a Washington State Commission of Men and Boys to address higher rates of incarceration and mental health issues among the state’s male residents.
An ‘unfinished basement’ with no trained officers
The family’s claim alleged Garfield County jail staff twice “served food to Kyle’s corpse.” The county’s jail was not staffed by trained corrections officers, but by civilian dispatch officers, said Dreveskracht, who is also a board member of the Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission.
“This is an example of what happens when you have folks who masquerade as corrections officers,” Dreveskracht said, adding that the commission trains corrections officers on suicide prevention, basic health care and other issues that could have prevented Kyle Lara’s death.
Saldaña, one of four legislators on the 18-person Joint Legislative Task Force on Jail Standards that recommended the oversight agency, called the Garfield County Jail an “unfinished basement.”
“We didn’t visit but we did get a picture,” Saldaña said. “It was alarming that we had a jail like that in existence in Washington state. It looks like a hundred years ago.”
Left: Picture of Garfield County jail cell. Right: Food delivered to Kyle Lara after his death. (Ryan Dreveskracht/Galanda Broadman, PLLC)
Chanel Rhymes, director of advocacy at Northwest Community Bail Fund, said “people would be offended if an animal was housed” in many local jails in Washington, including in larger counties like King County.
Rhymes, who’s been incarcerated herself, said incarcerated people often say they’d rather be in a state prison as opposed to a county jail. She pointed out that Washington jails have some of the highest death rates in the country. Most recently, a 43-year-old woman died on Wednesday in Snohomish County’s jail, the sixth death recorded there since last September.
“Garfield County is an extreme, but there’s an element of that in every single jail across the state,” said Rhymes, who supports Saldaña’s legislation. Rhymes also wants to see the state allow people to leave jail without paying bail if they’re deemed safe to be in the community.
The cell where Kyle Lara died is housed in the basement of a courthouse built in 1901, according to the family’s claim, which described the jail as having “dungeon-like conditions of confinement that are intolerable in any civilized society.”
David Lara said that aside from the jail’s conditions, the county failed to adequately screen his son for his mental health and substance-use disorder treatment needs, which Washington’s jails have long come under scrutiny for. The Lara family believes that Kyle Lara would have been diverted to a behavioral health facility if he received proper care.
“All this stuff was documented while he was incarcerated before, but no one followed through on any of that mental health [care] he received while he was incarcerated,” David Lara said. “The medications they had him on, they just stop it…You just can’t do that to people.”
The Lara family said the funds from the settlement will help provide for the future of their 13-year-old granddaughter — Kyle Lara’s daughter. She’s currently seeing a grief counselor: “A rare person in the system who truly helped us,” David Lara said. He wishes his child could have received the same kind of thoughtful care his granddaughter is getting now.
“Kyle just had a drug problem. But anybody who really knew my son when he wasn’t on one of his binges [knew] he had a great heart,” David Lara said. “He had empathy. He never ever went out of his way to hurt anybody. He loved his daughter so, so much.”
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: [email protected]. Follow Washington State Standard on Facebook and X.