Was it suicide? Questions abound in death of pepper-sprayed inmate

Sometime around 10 p.m. on Sept. 6, the guards at Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County decided to take action against Joseph Damien Duran, a mentally ill inmate who had been acting up inside his cell for hours. Duran, a 35-year-old career criminal who had been at the prison for two days, was refusing to take his medications, pounding on his cell door and making faces at prison staffers.

He rejected orders to place his hands through the food port opening in his cell door to be handcuffed, and refused to close the food port. Finally, guards aimed through the port and blasted him in the face with pepper spray.

Duran breathed through a tube in his throat, the result of a 2006 tracheotomy. Agitated and still coated with pepper spray, he pulled the breathing tube out of the hole, or stoma, in his throat and rinsed it in the cell toilet. He began putting his finger into the hole and coughing up blood; he took strands of spaghetti from his dinner tray and stuffed those into the throat hole as well. Over the next few hours, he would continue to refuse to come out of the cell, where he was housed alone.

Read more at The Bee: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/21/6090955/was-it-suicide-questions-abound.html

This story was originally published January 30, 2014 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Was it suicide? Questions abound in death of pepper-sprayed inmate."