Tonnette Washington, whose husband Asaiah Washington recently died in the Sacramento County Main Jail, is surrounded by family and friends after speaking about her husbandÃs death on Thursday. Washington died on July 26 after he and his cellmate were found unconscious in their cell. (Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Fla. — The scene Thursday outside the Sacramento County Main Jail was all too familiar: a grieving Black family clutching handmade signs demanding to know how and why their loved one had died in sheriff’s custody.

Asaiah Washington’s family was the latest. On Thursday, Washington’s family and community advocates gathered at the jail to demand answers for Asaiah and accountability from Sacramento County and Sheriff’s Office leaders for the mounting toll behind bars of what advocates are calling a “death chamber.”

“We simply want to know what happened? We have hurt and pain. We are frustrated and confused. We are in a place that has become a burial ground for Black men and women,” said advocate Berry Accius of Voice of the Youth.

“Why does this continue to happen? Why are the answers so vague?” Accius said. “We can’t continue to see Black men come to the county jail and end up found dead.”

Thirty people have died in Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office custody since 2021.

“It’s officially become commonplace for folks to gather outside this jail,” said Meg White of the advocacy group JUICE Sacramento, surrounded by Washington’s family. “We need independent oversight.”

Washington had been held at the downtown jail since June. He was 40 years old when he was found unresponsive in his cell last Friday, July 26 — the fifth in-custody death in the last 11 weeks. The three other inmate deaths occurred May 5, May 12 and June 8 at the downtown facility; another man died June 28 at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center near Elk Grove.

Three of the five who have died since early May were African American, online coroner’s records show.

Sheriff’s officials say jailers found Washington and a second man unresponsive in their eight-floor cell about 11:15 a.m. Friday after a suspected fentanyl overdose. Jail deputies administered multiple doses of Narcan to the pair. The drug revived Washington’s cellmate. Washington was pronounced dead.

Deputies will complete “a thorough inmate death investigation in accordance with department procedures and state laws,” Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi said in a statement following Washington’s death. Results are likely months away.

At least six people died in Sacramento County’s jails in 2023. At least three were drug-related, prompting a letter from the San Quentin-based Prison Law Office pleading for more stringent employee drug screenings.

“The Sacramento County Jail is in crisis,” the lawyers wrote. “Drugs are widely available inside the facilities, and people are dying as a result.”

Sheriff Jim Cooper defended his jail deputies in an October 2023 op-ed, blaming the county’s jail health services provider’s “ineptitude” instead.

“It is not a coincidence that most of the deaths at the jail have been medically related,” Cooper wrote.

But advocates Thursday laid blame at Cooper and Sacramento County supervisors, seeking answers after the latest death.

“How many people have to die before they’ve seen a courtroom? How many people have to die before our elected representatives hold our sheriff accountable?” said Keyan Bliss, of the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission and Decarcerate Sacramento. “We need to ask real questions and demand answers.”

Washington’s wife, Tonette, had last spoken to him at 10 a.m. that morning, a little more than an hour before deputies discovered him in his cell. He had been in good spirits, but sounded “sluggish,” in his final call, she said. She disputes her husband had fentanyl in his system and said medication administered at the jail led to his death.

Nearly a week later, she said sheriff’s officials had yet to call her or family members since her husband’s death. The lone call from authorities came from the county coroner’s office.

“My husband would be here. We talked to him at 10 a.m. By 11:15, he was gone,” Tonette Washington told reporters at a noon news conference outside the jail on downtown Sacramento’s I Street.

“We’re lost. We don’t know what’s going on.”

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