Former Southern California News Group columnist David Whiting is suing the Orange County Sheriff’s Department for the apparent in-custody suicide of his 35-year-old son in 2022.
David Whiting’s son, Sean, was mentally ill and should have been more closely monitored in jail, says the wrongful death suit filed Dec. 22 in federal court. Whiting choked to death in his cell, with parts of an orange and its peel found jammed in his throat with other food.
Less than two hours before Whiting’s death, an Orange County Superior Court judge ordered him released from jail, where he was in custody for allegedly violating a temporary restraining order. The lawsuit by David Whiting alleged his son should have been in a jail mental health ward, but instead was placed in the general population after the court hearing.
The department’s “decision to place a suicidal inmate with severe mental illness in the general population and give him a snack with an orange was outrageous and utterly negligent,” states the lawsuit. David Whiting is represented by attorneys Annee Della Donna, Eric Dubin and Diane Bass.
The Sheriff’s Department declined comment on the suit, which is standard for pending litigation.
David Whiting retired in 2019 as an award-winning metro columnist for the Southern California News Group and, earlier, the Orange County Register, where he had worked for three decades. Over his 10-year tenure as a columnist, he wrote more than 1,000 pieces. Previously, he was an assistant managing editor at the Register.
The suit contains a troubling timeline of Sean Whiting’s mental decline, leading to his arrest on Dec. 21, 2022, and his death two days later.
Whiting had a history of mental illness and had been hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. He would not sleep for days because of severe insomnia, resulting in hallucinations. He also had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as well as anxiety disorder and suffered from depression, the lawsuit says.
Whiting lived off and on with his mother, Susan Ann Smith, but became verbally and physically abusive, forcing her to insist that he move elsewhere, according to the lawsuit. She urged him to get psychiatric care and offered to pay for his rent and treatment, but he refused and declared that he would kill himself rather than live on the street, the suit states.
Smith obtained a restraining order against her son after he would not leave her house, the suit said. He took the restraining order from a deputy, placed it on a table and walked out of the house — returning later in violation of the court order and in view of the deputy.
The suit says Whiting had been in a mental ward until after his court hearing via Zoom. With his imminent release, he may have feared that he would be homeless, the suit indicates.
“Because Mr. Whiting received an order of release at a time when he could not live with … Smith … he had no place to go. Therefore, as soon as (the Sheriff’s Department) and the county provided him with the means to do so, Mr. Whiting committed suicide,” the lawsuit says.
The suit also alleged the department issued a vague and misleading news release after Whiting’s death to mask its culpability. An in-custody death investigation is under way by the Orange County district attorney’s office.
Another lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department has been filed in federal court by Whiting’s mother. Whiting was the 12th Orange County jail inmate to die in 2022.
Four years earlier, an Orange County grand jury concluded that nearly half of the deaths at the jail could have been avoided if the Sheriff’s Department and medical staff had paid more attention to inmate health issues.
The panel found that inmates sometimes didn’t get in-house medical treatment when necessary, weren’t diagnosed properly for preexisting health problems or mental illness, and didn’t get outside medical help in a timely manner. Those issues in the jails, the grand jury wrote, increase the chances “that an inmate will not make it out alive.”
