Another man dies while in-custody of the Shasta County Jail, bringing this year’s  fatality count to three.

Just six weeks after the last in-custody death at the Shasta County Jail, another incarcerated man was found in his cell without a pulse. 

“Staff were alerted by inmates of a subject down in their cell,” the Sheriff’s Oct. 27 press release indicated, where they attempted to resuscitate the 24-year-old Michael Kennith Jorgenson. According to the Sheriff’s Office, Jorgenson briefly resumed breathing before being routed to a hospital, where he died shortly thereafter at 1:05 am. 

Court records show that Jorgenson was facing charges of felony domestic violence and elder abuse filed in October. He had not been convicted of a crime at the time of his death and was scheduled to appear in court today for a plea disposition. Jorgenson’s cause of death will be determined by autopsy in the coming months. 

Jorgenson is the third person to die this year while incarcerated at the Shasta County Jail, and the seventh since 2022, when California passed AB 2761. The bill requires law enforcement to publicly disclose the details of every civilian death that occurs while in custody. Recorded deaths under AB 2761 are available online on the county’s website, which is periodically updated with causes of death once autopsies are completed by the coroner. 

Recent updates to previously undetermined autopsies of deaths in Shasta custody include 60-year-old Manuel Galindo Garcia, who died in 2024 in a sobering cell. He was found by the coroner to have succumbed to methamphetamine–related arrhythmia, a heart condition brought on by the use of substances, which the coroner described as an accident. Juan Moreno, who died four and a half months later in January of 2025, was found to have committed suicide by hanging.

According to a report produced by the Shasta County Grand Jury, Shasta’s in-custody deaths far outnumber those of similar counties. Historical data of deaths in custody, aggregated from both the California Department of Justice’s Open Justice portal and the county, paints an even more vivid statistical picture of Shasta’s in-custody fatalities. 

Since 2006, — the farthest back Open Justice data goes — 44 people have died while incarcerated at the Shasta County Jail. About half of those deaths occurred within the last five years, with 12 occurring in 2021 alone. The overwhelming majority of people who have died while incarcerated were never convicted of a crime. The most common cause of death, as reported by the county, was suicide. 

The California legislature recently passed AB 1108 which will change autopsy requirements for in-custody deaths in counties where the sheriff and coroners offices are combined – including Shasta. Effective January 1, 2027, when someone dies in jail, Shasta will be required to contract with a third party medical examiner, or another California county which has an independent coroner, to perform the autopsy. This comes after advocates in Southern California called for sheriffs to recuse themselves during autopsies for in-custody deaths, due to the inherent conflict of interest of overseeing both jail conditions and the autopsies of those who die while incarcerated. 

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