Dublin, CA – Attorney Adante Pointer, of Oakland-based Pointer & Buelna, Lawyers For The People, announced last week they have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Santa Rita Jail in response to a September 2023 incident in which Yuri Brand, who had schizophrenia, was killed within 46 minutes of Bryson Levy being put into his cell.
According to the complaint filed on Wednesday, Brand was taken into custody at Santa Rita Jail on September 8, 2023, for nonviolent criminal charges. For reasons they do not know, deputies did not place Brand, who suffered from schizophrenia, “into mental health housing nor did they classify him as a behavioral health inmate despite knowing that Mr. Brand was schizophrenic and had gone without medication for days.”
Instead, he was placed in general population.
Five days later, Brand was assigned a cellmate—Bryson Levy.
According to the complaint, “Levy was in the midst of his own mental health crisis and had a documented criminal history of violence, sexual assault, and the use of deadly weapons.”
The complaint alleges that, despite knowing this, the deputies “still elected to place Mr. Levy in the cell with Mr. Brand rather than a more restrictive housing.”
Brand, 39, was found on the cell floor on Sept. 13, 2023, with Levy on top of him. According to the subsequent death investigation, Brand was reportedly strangled and suffocated with a mattress.
“This was a tragic but foreseeable outcome of placing the two men in the cell given the lack of adequate supervision and mental health care,” the complaint alleges.
Adanté Pointer in a release said, “(T)hey ignored Levy’s violent history and placed him into close quarters with someone he could victimize, all the while neglecting to properly supervise the two men.
“We intend to find answers to why Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies at the jail housed Mr. Brand with a violent individual in the midst of a crisis, rather than in appropriate mental health housing,” Pointer said, “and how their loved one could have been subjected to such a horrific death, and why his family has not received answers about what happened to Mr. Brand.”
Following Brand’s death, the Alameda County Coroner’s Office, which is managed by the same Alameda County Sheriff Department that operates Santa Rita Jail “took an inordinate amount of time to release Mr. Brand’s body to his family,” the complaint continues.
As a result, the family expressed concerns about the autopsy report, “which described Mr. Brand’s tongue as having “no contusions or bite marks” yet when the family examined his body they discovered Mr. Brand’s tongue had a jagged serration that ran from the tip to the throat.”
Furthermore, “the toxicology report confirmed Mr. Brand did not have any medications in his system despite the County being well aware of Mr. Brand’s mental health condition and his need for medication, all in direct contravention of the Santa Rita Jail Consent Decree which requires the Jail to provide adequate mental health care to all incarcerated persons with mental health issues.”
Brand’s mother, the complaint notes, has been forced to bring forward this lawsuit in order to obtain the information “she and her family so desperately deserves and to hold those heretofore not being held responsible for setting in motion the deadly chain of events which resulted in her son’s death accountable.”
Brand is the 68th inmate to die at the notorious Alameda County jail since 2014. Levy has been charged with murder. The lawsuit, Edgerly v. County of Alameda et al, was filed Sept. 5 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, in San Francisco.
