A 37-year-old man jailed in Tarrant County died Tuesday at a Fort Worth hospital, marking the sixth in-custody death at the jail this year, according to the sheriff’s office.
The Tarrant County medical examiner identified the man as Jose Orozco. He died at John Peter Smith Hospital at 12:11 p.m. Tuesday, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.
Orozco was booked into jail Monday at 1:53 a.m. after he was arrested by Fort Worth police on a charge of burglary of a building.
A detention officer found Orozco unresponsive in his cell at 11:05 a.m. Tuesday.
The sheriff’s office said all in-custody deaths are investigated and reviewed by jail staff, the agency’s criminal investigations division, the medical examiner’s office, an outside law enforcement agency, JPS medical staff, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
There have been six in-custody deaths reported at the Tarrant County jail this year, according to sheriff’s department spokeswoman Laurie Passman
Gemma Swingle, 36, died at the Tarrant County jail on Aug. 29. Swingle’s cause of death has not yet been determined. John Barr, 36, was found unresponsive in his cell on April 19, three days after he was booked into the jail. Barr’s cause of death was an accidental drug overdose due to fentanyl, methadone and methamphetamine toxicity, according to the county medical examiner.
Three men died at the Tarrant jail in June, all within the same week.