DuPage County, sheriff agree to $11 million payout for jail death

Chicago Tribune

10-03-2025

DuPage County and county Sheriff James Mendrick have reached an $11 million settlement with the estate of Reneyda Aguilar-Hurtado, a 50-year-old mother who died in June 2023 after being held in the county jail for 85 days while awaiting transfer to a state-run mental health center.
Approved by a judge last month, the settlement caps a federal lawsuit brought by Aguilar-Hurtado's daughter, Cristal Moreno Aguilar, accusing the county, Mendrick and 11 jail medical staff members or corrections officers of repeatedly failing to act as her mother's health rapidly deteriorated.
A county pathologist determined her death was due, in part, to 'medical neglect.'
The nearly 50-page complaint, filed a month after Aguilar-Hurtado's death, cited about a dozen examples of other jail detainees — some who died while on medical watch, others who have sued the jail over health care complaints — in alleging a 'widespread practice and policy of deliberate indifference to the health and safety of critically ill inmates suffering from life-threatening conditions under their custody and control.'
Mendrick, who recently announced his intent to forgo a third term as sheriff and instead seek the Republican nomination for Illinois governor in 2026, declined to comment through his spokesperson. So, too, did County Board Chair Deborah Conroy.
The defendants in court filings denied any wrongdoing.
'Reneyda's tragic death never should have happened,' said Michael Mead, an attorney for the family, in a statement. 'It was preventable and the loss that her family experienced cannot be made whole. We hope that the settlement provides justice and some closure for her family.'
The $11 million payout is more than three times the combined cost of seven lawsuits involving the sheriff's office that have been settled in the last three years, according to records obtained by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request. The largest, at $2.5 million, stemmed from a deputy's fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy in 2017 — a shooting prosecutors determined was justified.
Additionally, legal fees related to lawsuits against the sheriff's office have exceeded $550,000 in the last three years, records show.
Advocates and attorneys who work with Illinois' mental health and criminal court systems previously told the Tribune that Aguilar-Hurtado's death exposed a confluence of long-standing failures: The continued overreliance on police as first responders in a mental health crisis. The limited community-based treatment options. The scarcity of beds tied largely to staffing shortages at state mental health hospitals.
All of that has forced vulnerable people like Aguilar-Hurtado into extended confinement in county jails that are often ill-equipped to care for them. And as her story laid bare, a jail's inability — or unwillingness, as her family alleged — to protect the people in its custody can shatter lives.
'People are landing in our jails in bad shape, physically and mentally, and they are too often made worse because of the conditions in jail,' Amanda Antholt, a managing attorney with the nonprofit Equip for Equality, previously told the Tribune. 'That's the problem we want to get at. We want them to be treated humanely and get the care they need to not be in jail or to survive their court process without getting hurt.'
Aguilar-Hurtado, the mother of two children, had been previously hospitalized for treatment of schizophrenia when she was accused in July 2022 of kicking a woman in the leg at a grocery store near her home in west suburban Addison.
She was arrested and released from custody that same day and, shortly thereafter, voluntarily entered the state-run Elgin Mental Health Center for nearly five weeks of treatment. In the six months that followed her discharge, she missed four court dates. And by March 2023, she was in DuPage County Jail on a $10,000 bond.
The next month, a judge ruled she was unfit to stand trial on two misdemeanor battery counts and ordered that she return to a state mental hospital until he and doctors were satisfied she could understand the charges against her and confer with her public defender.
She remained in jail for 85 days while waiting to be transferred. Advocates called the delay a symptom of a chronic issue driven in part by decades of mental health center closures, staffing shortages and limited community resources.
On the morning of June 12, 2023, a DuPage sheriff's deputy opened the door to cell 1-G-04 and found Aguilar-Hurtado on her mattress. A sheriff's incident report describes her as cold and unresponsive.
Medical staff at the hospital were able to revive her, a deputy coroner wrote in his report, but after she 'suffered cardiac arrest several times,' there was nothing more they could do. Weighing nearly 200 pounds at the time of her incarceration, she had lost close to 60 pounds while in jail.
The county's chief forensic pathologist determined Aguilar-Hurtado died of 'multisystem organ failure' caused by 'failure to thrive due to psychotic disorder.'
'Acute esophageal necrosis, self-neglect and medical neglect contributed significantly to her death,' the pathologist wrote in her report, adding that Aguilar-Hurtado arrived at the hospital with 'physical signs of acute illness for days prior without significant medical intervention.'
Aguilar-Hurtado is one of 13 DuPage County Jail detainees who died between January 2014 and September 2024, according to a Tribune review of reports the jail is required to submit to the state Department of Corrections and county coroner records.
Five people whose death records were reviewed by the Tribune appear to have been on medical watch at the time of their deaths. Among them was Sebastiano Ceraulo, 21, whose Jan. 8, 2016, death resulted in a federal lawsuit settled in 2019.
Another death shares similarities to Aguilar-Hurtado's. Lance Thomas, 60, had been behind bars for nearly two months when, on June 24, 2020, a deputy noticed he did not collect his lunch tray. The deputy checked on Thomas and discovered he wasn't breathing.
A coroner's report notes that Thomas had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had refused breakfast that morning, would not take his medications, and was 'markedly thin and frail and had urinated on himself.' He was supposed to have weekly weight checks but the coroner's investigator couldn't find the results.
Aguilar-Hurtado's family lawsuit also included nine other examples of jail detainees who have accused the jail of providing inadequate medical care. Most stem from alleged incidents that predate Mendrick as sheriff. Five have led to settled lawsuits.
'We believe that DuPage County has recognized the systemic failures and biases that allowed this tragedy to occur,' Mead, the family's attorney, said in a statement. 'We are encouraged that officials have made real and substantial changes in how they monitor and care for detainees with mental illness, with changes to training, administrative oversight, and policies and procedures for urgently transferring detainees to hospitals.'