Several teens overdosed at a Los Angeles County juvenile hall last year after they drank from a water jug spiked with a “dangerous narcotic” that was passed around in a classroom, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed this month.
The April 2025 incident at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey sent three teenagers to a hospital, months after a California oversight body ruled the facility was not a safe place for youths to be housed. The suit alleges the overdoses were caused by a combination of an L.A. County Probation Department policy banning youths from having personal water bottles and the department’s failure to properly staff the hall.
An overdose victim who brought the lawsuit said in court filings that he became lightheaded, began vomiting and struggled to maintain control of his body after drinking from the spiked jug on April 12. The teen is not being identified by The Times because he was a juvenile at the time of the incident.
Another juvenile in detention passed around the tainted jug, according to the suit. The teen who brought the claim said he remained ill for weeks after the incident, suffering from regular nausea and body weakness.
Probation officials contend the water bottle ban is common practice and consistent with state law, but the lawsuit alleges it paved the way for the overdoses last April. The teen who overdosed was put into “an absurd and vulnerable position,” the lawsuit claims.
Probation officials “neither installed functional water fountains nor provided individual water bottles to students, nor did they adequately staff the classroom,” the suit said.
By having a communal jug, the lawsuit alleged, the staff at Los Padrinos “permitted a juvenile to control the water supply and thereby determine other students’ access to water.”
The teen who overdosed was allowed to drink at the “discretion of a youth who had contaminated the water supply with a narcotic,” the suit claims.
Vicky Waters, communications director for the Probation Department, said she could not comment on pending litigation. In general, she said, water bottles “are not issued to youth due to documented safety, sanitation, and security concerns, including misuse of bottles and the potential to conceal contraband.” Youths in custody have access to drinking fountains and operable sinks in their rooms, Waters said.
After the April incident, Waters said, probation officials enhanced screening measures at entrances to its facilities, including the expanded use of drug-sniffing dogs and “airport-style body scanners.”
The suit did not specify what drug was involved, but said responding officers and paramedics gave the teen who sued multiple doses of Narcan, which is used to reverse overdoses caused by opioids such as fentanyl.
The teen behind the lawsuit told The Times he remembers one of his classmates getting sick after drinking from the same jug.
The teen also recalled being denied the ability to contact his mother for days after he was hospitalized. The teen’s mother was so desperate for an update on her son’s health last year that his criminal defense attorney, Jerod Gunsberg, made an open plea in a Times article for probation officials to provide information.
“If someone from probation ends up reading this, I’m easy to find. … So call me,” Gunsberg told The Times last year.
A spokeswoman for the public defender’s office, which represented the two other teens who overdosed that day, said she could not comment on how their clients got sick.
“A safety measure that may have contributed to overdoses is, by definition, a failed policy,” the public defender’s office said in a statement. “The ongoing pattern of violence and overdoses continues to underscore Probation’s failure to adequately protect the young people in its care.”
Nine teens and probation staff members at Los Padrinos were hospitalized last July after they were exposed to an unidentified narcotic. Probation officers and staff members have been charged with smuggling drugs into the facility in the last year. In 2023, 18-year-old Bryan Diaz died of a fentanyl overdose at the county’s other main juvenile hall in Sylmar.
Waters said there has not been an overdose incident at Los Padrinos in the last year. She also said an investigation showed the July incident was not connected to drugs, though she did not specify what triggered the hospitalization of staff members in that incident.
Los Padrinos continues to operate despite a California Board of State and Community Corrections ruling that it is unsafe for youths. The Probation Department refused to shut down the hall, but L.A. County Superior Court Judge Miguel Espinoza ruled it was “unlawful” for youths to continue to be housed at Los Padrinos last year.
Espinoza has stopped short of shutting down the hall, though, and the state board has no enforcement arm. There were 270 juveniles housed at Los Padrinos last April. There are now 217, according to Waters. The state board will inspect Los Padrinos again in August and reassess its suitability.
The California attorney general’s office is also seeking to in effect take over the juvenile halls after years of scandals and dangerous incidents under the Probation Department’s watch, but a judge mired that request in evidentiary hearings in October that remain ongoing.
The teen who filed the lawsuit is now out of custody and working to become a barber. But from his time inside, he said, he believes probation officials are indifferent to the health of the youths in their care.
“It just keeps going on, they genuinely don’t care,” he said. “It’s crazy how they treat people there.”
The post Drug-spiked water jug caused teens to overdose in L.A. juvenile hall, lawsuit alleges appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
