This story was reported for Patch Media on April 25, 2018. It is the recipient of multiple awards for investigative journalism.
SAN DIEGO, CA — On a sweltering April afternoon in 2017, James Leonard Acuna spent what may have been the last day of his life playing soccer with fellow inmates at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, a few miles north of the Mexican border. The 58-year-old Los Angeles resident was serving a 16-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon, and was sharing a cell with a man convicted of murdering his father.
It was a year ago this week Acuna died quietly in his cell, on April 21 or 22 – nobody knows for sure because his body wasn’t discovered until April 24, hidden under a blanket on his bed and decayed to the point it caused an odor prison employees initially thought was a sewage problem.
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