A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy working as a guard at Twin Towers Correctional Facility used force against inmate Jeffrey Fairchild, allegedly smashing him face-first into a metal window frame and causing him to fall to the concrete floor, according to federal monitors overseeing conduct by deputies in L.A. County jails.
The force of the impact left Fairchild a quadriplegic after the September 2024 incident, his family members said. He was taken to a hospital and remained under close medical care until April 21, 2025, when he suffered a heart attack and died at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach.
In the wake of Fairchild’s death, his family members filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County, Eric Barraza — the deputy who the monitors said used force against Fairchild — and a number of unnamed deputies who were working in the jail that day.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, claims that Barraza used excessive and unreasonable force, and that Fairchild’s death from complications stemming from the incident was wrongful. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed in September 2025, but the federal monitors recently released their report containing key details about the incident.
“According to him, they had handcuffed him and given him a sugar test for diabetes,” said Fairchild’s stepmother, Denise Fairchild. “The nurse couldn’t prick him or whatever the procedure was, and he got up to go back to his cell and that’s when [Barraza] … threw him against the wall and broke his neck.”
In a filing in response to the lawsuit, attorneys for the Sheriff’s Department and Barraza denied any wrongdoing, stating that the force used “was reasonable under the circumstances” and that all conduct “was in good faith and without malicious intent.”
Lawrence, Beach, Allen & Choi, the law firm listed in court records as representing the Sheriff’s Department and Barraza, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A Sheriff’s Department report, which was cited by federal court-appointed monitors of the department, said Barraza claimed that Fairchild had charged at him, and that he used reasonable force in response. Barraza was also quoted in the department report as saying that he applied downward pressure in a safe manner to “guide the inmate to the floor,” according to a Sept. 8 report issued by the federal monitors as part of the ongoing proceedings of a 2012 class-action lawsuit.
“The Department remains committed to ensuring that all uses of force are thoroughly investigated and evaluated through established administrative review processes and independent oversight,” the department said in an emailed statement to The Times. “In the incident involving Mr. Fairchild, the Department conducted an internal administrative investigation, and appropriate administrative action was taken.”
Many of the materials detailing and documenting the incident haven’t been released publicly by the Sheriff’s Department. But the federal court monitors’ report said that CCTV video of the incident contains details that differ significantly from the Sheriff’s Department’s account.
In their report, the monitors determined that Fairchild was walking away from Barraza — not charging at him — when the deputy deployed force, that the takedown was swift and violent, and that the use of force was “preventable” and out of compliance with applicable safety standards.
The Sheriff’s Department has said that it cited Barraza for failing to deploy de-escalation tactics before using force and that it disciplined a sergeant for failures during the assessment after the incident.
The federal monitors said that despite those steps, there was never any discipline for the actual use of force, and that the Sheriff’s Department did nothing to address what the monitors alleged were factual misrepresentations of the circumstances of the incident during its investigation.
At the time of the incident, Fairchild was incarcerated after being arrested Sept. 12, 2024, for violating his parole on a 2022 criminal threat conviction.
In an interview, Denise and Jeffrey’s father, Halford Fairchild, acknowledged that Jeffrey led a troubled life, shuffling in and out of jail on a variety of charges and convictions.
But Denise said that he didn’t deserve to die the way that he did, and that she hopes their lawsuit will “force some accountability” for law enforcement officers who harm inmates.
“The only way this is going to stop is for the perpetrators of this violence against inmates to be punished,” Halford said, adding that “this particular case is one that should bring to light these abuses and put a stop to them.”
The Fairchilds said Jeffrey, who would be 57 in December, was intelligent, well-read and had a great sense of humor, with a passion for creative writing.
Jeffrey, who had one daughter, wrote poetry and rap lyrics with a social conscience and was involved in jailhouse ministry while he was incarcerated.
“Jeffrey was always a free-spirited youth, very creative, did a lot of writing,” Halford said. “He was always trying to be a leader, helping others to do better.”
The Fairchild incident is the latest in a long series of uses of force inside L.A. County jails that have generated public scrutiny. In July 2022, for instance, a sheriff’s deputy was captured on video slamming an inmate’s head into a wall at Men’s Central Jail without provocation, as The Times reported at the time. The inmate suffered a deep head wound.
In 2012, county jail inmates filed a lawsuit called Rosas vs. Baca — now Rosas vs. Luna, for current Sheriff Robert Luna — alleging that cruel and excessive violence was commonly used against inmates, and that the Sheriff’s Department under then-Sheriff Lee Baca had done too little to address the conduct.
In 2015, the inmates reached an agreement with the county that required the department to make changes to drive down the number of beatings that take place in its correctional facilities. In 2022, the federal monitors released a report finding that guards in L.A. County jails routinely struck inmates on the head in violation of use-of-force policies.
“The Department takes the findings and recommendations of the court-appointed Rosas monitors seriously and remains committed to addressing identified concerns through appropriate accountability and corrective measures,” the Sheriff’s Department said in its emailed statement.
Now, nearly 15 years after the Rosas lawsuit was filed, the department still hasn’t done enough to stop violence by deputies behind bars or discipline those who perpetrate it, according to Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which represented the inmates in the 2012 case.
“This case is part of a troubling pattern where the Sheriff’s Department approves uses of force the independent Monitors find to be clearly out of policy,” Eliasberg said in a statement. “Equally troubling, the Department does not discipline deputies for statements made during the investigation to justify their actions when those statements are obviously inconsistent with clear video evidence.”
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