Inmate Dies After Jump from Second Story of Santa Barbara County Main Jail

Sheriff’s Office Investigating Apparent Suicide of Scott Powers, 61

Santa Barbara's South County Jail. | Credit: Daniel Dreifuss (file)

On the last day of the year, an inmate at Santa Barbara County’s Main Jail reportedly jumped from a second-story housing unit and later died at Cottage Hospital.

Scott Powers, 61, jumped at about 8:10 a.m. from a multi-person housing unit on Sunday, December 31, according to a press release from the Sheriff’s Office that evening. Custody deputies and medical staff went into the unit, began CPR, and used a defibrillator on Powers.

While the Sheriff’s Office believes that Powers died by suicide, investigators from three Sheriff’s agencies — criminal, coroners, administrative — are looking into the death.

Powers was arrested in Goleta and had been booked into the jail on December 28 on two warrants related to property and narcotic crimes. The misdemeanor warrants carried a total of $40,000 bail, Sheriff’s spokesperson Lieutenant Jarrett Morris said.

Powers’s cell was one of eight on the second floor, each of which could hold two people. He had not been placed in a safety cell, and Morris could not say whether he was on meds or had expressed suicidal ideation. Powers was alone when he fell, Morris said. Further details about Powers’s incarceration were pending an investigation, the Sheriff’s Office stated.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.