El Paso County paid $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit over a 48-year-old man’s death in the county jail three years ago, attorneys for his family announced Wednesday.
Cristo Canett was arrested in April 2022 while at a hospital emergency room seeking treatment for severe abdominal pain. He was jailed and denied further needed medical care despite his obvious signs of distress until he died in the jail two days after his arrest, his family alleged in a federal civil rights lawsuit against El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal, the county commissioners, medical provider Wellpath and several individual medical professionals.
The $2.5 million settlement, which county officials agreed to late last year but was not finalized until Wednesday, settles the legal claims against the sheriff and county. The lawsuit is continuing against Wellpath and the other defendants.
Wellpath, then the jail’s controversial private medical provider and one of the largest prison healthcare providers in the country, declared bankruptcy in late 2024, which delayed the lawsuit. The company emerged from bankruptcy last week.
“We’re happy that the county was willing to take some responsibility for what happened here,” said Dan Weiss, an attorney for Canett’s family.
A spokeswoman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.
Canett died after he suffered an ulcer that created a hole in the lining of his small intestine. It’s a treatable condition, but jail medical staff refused to give Canett any help beyond mild painkillers even as he moaned in pain, could not walk and complained about nausea and abdominal pain for hours, the lawsuit alleged.
Canett was arrested on April 24, 2022, at the emergency room at Centura-St. Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs. He’d gone to the emergency room to seek medical attention for rapidly worsening pain in his stomach and back, according to the lawsuit. While there, he got into a dispute with his sister about the use of a shared car, according to the complaint. The sister’s husband called Colorado Springs police.
The officers arrested Canett, telling him there was a warrant out for his arrest because he had failed to return to the halfway house where he lived. But Canett told the officers he had permission not to return on time to the halfway house because he was seeking medical care. The officers then spoke with the halfway house employees, who said they “did not mean to submit an ‘escape’ warrant” because they knew Canett was at the hospital, according to the lawsuit.
A police sergeant nevertheless arrested Canett. She removed him from the emergency room before he saw a doctor, and believed he was at the hospital only to seek drugs, the family alleged in the lawsuit.
Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.