San Diego County Sheriff's Office moved dementia patient, 82, from jail medical unit to solitary confinement; he died nine days later

On July 28, 2025, Karim Talib, an 82-year-old man with dementia who relied on a wheelchair and was incontinent, was found dead in his cell at San Diego's Central Jail, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit his family filed against the county on December 19, 2025. Talib had been arrested in August 2024 after assaulting his roommate at the senior care facility where they both lived; the roommate later died from the assault. He was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to a state psychiatric hospital, where after five months he was declared to have no substantial likelihood of regaining competency and a clinician recommended round-the-clock care. Rather than release him, as is normally required once a defendant is found unlikely to regain competency, San Diego County prosecutors sought a Murphy conservatorship to keep him in custody, and he was returned to the Central Jail on May 24, 2025.

From late May through July 19, jail staff housed Talib in the Central Jail's medical observation unit, where, according to the lawsuit, staff helped him eat, take medication and change his diapers; medical records cited in the suit describe him as disoriented and unable to care for himself. On July 19, the San Diego County Sheriff's Office moved Talib from the medical unit into an administrative separation unit — solitary confinement. The lawsuit says the move violated jail policy against housing state-hospital returnees in segregation; the Union-Tribune reported it could not independently verify that specific policy existed, though the Sheriff's Office's current written policies require a mental health provider to follow all state-hospital returnees and require staff to notify a watch commander whenever a segregation placement is deemed inappropriate.

Sworn declarations from two men housed near Talib in the segregation unit, gathered by an attorney in a separate class-action lawsuit over San Diego jail conditions, describe him lying in his own waste for days, unresponsive when spoken to, while the unit began to smell of feces. According to the family's lawsuit, jail medical staff documented Talib's unresponsiveness and incontinence but did not take his vital signs, recognize that he lacked the capacity to consent to food or medication, or return him to the medical unit as his condition worsened, and more than an hour passed after other detainees alerted staff that he appeared lifeless before anyone checked on him. The Sheriff's Office has said deputies distributing medication found Talib unresponsive the morning of July 28 and performed CPR before paramedics arrived and pronounced him dead at the scene. The county Medical Examiner's Office ruled the cause of death hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease complicated by an acute kidney infection.

Updates

2026-06-23 — Judge let deliberate-indifference claims proceed, dismissed NaphCare [3]

U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia ruled that deliberate-indifference, negligence and disability-discrimination claims against three named jail medical staff members — Kieko Fukue, Theresa Palafox and Edgar Timpug — could proceed, finding the complaint's allegations that they failed to take Talib's vitals, assess his condition or summon care were "adequate at the pleading stage." Battaglia dismissed jail medical contractor NaphCare from the suit entirely, ruling the plaintiffs had not sufficiently linked the company to Talib's care, and separately dismissed claims that the county had a policy or custom of deliberate indifference.