She Was Told Her Son Died in Jail From 'Drinking Too Much Water'. She Wants Answers.

Three days after her 22-year-old son was arrested in Minneapolis, Odulia Coba, received a horrifying phone call: not only was her son out of her reach, but he was now dead. 

And almost two months later, despite desperately seeking answers from authorities, she still has no clear answers. The only explanation she was given by hospital staff on the day of his death was that he died because he drank “a lot of water,” a response that Coba and her family say they cannot accept.

“I'm never going to see him again,” Coba said in Spanish at a community-organized event in Minneapolis in August. “Why does it have to be like this if they are there to take care of us, not to take our lives?”

On July 21, Cristian Rivera-Coba was pronounced dead after a “medical episode” where he was attended to by a detention deputy and medical staff at the Anoka County Jail in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cristian was booked on DUI and car theft charges, and told police he took Percocet pills with fentanyl shortly before he was pulled over on July 18.

When Odulia and the family received news of the medical incident they rushed out to Mercy Hospital where Cristian was transferred after he became unconscious. They say they begged police officers, staff at the jail, and the county for answers, only to be told in passing by hospital workers that he died because he drank too much water.

Alex Mingus, a teacher who knows Cristian’s family and was once an inmate at the Anoka County Jail himself says the drinking “a lot of water” explanation the family received is not very credible in his mind considering the experience he had there. He has been working with the family to get answers.

“You get a plastic cup and you only have a push button sink in your cell,” he told VICE News. “We were only allowed out of the cell a couple hours a day so you wouldn’t have time to access the day room fountain.”

Dr. Andrew Boozary, a primary care physician and adjunct professor of health policy at Columbia University who also created the Gattsuo Centre for Social Medicine to help at-risk populations said that considering Cristian’s age and that he had no known prior medical conditions, the water explanation may need to be explored further.

“You can certainly induce hyponatremia (in which sodium in the body can be diluted due to excessive water drinking and medical conditions and cause the body and mind to swell up), but it has to be a considerable amount of water in a short period,” Boozary told VICE News.

Dr. Suzanne Shoush, a physician who works as an expert witness to coroner inquiries on custody deaths, agrees that details are missing from this case. 

“To hold someone in custody means removing their autonomy. The jailer has exclusive control over the welfare of the person and is therefore exclusively responsible for the conditions in which this man lived and died,” said Shoush, who is also the Indigenous Health Faculty Lead for the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. 

“People who are incarcerated face a nearly insurmountable bias in having medical crises taken seriously. These are super high risk factors in bias preventing a person from accessing the medical care they need. I wonder if this death could have been preventable.” 

Over the past weeks, Odulia has spent hours calling officials for medical reports, only to be told that nothing has been released. VICE News has also been following up with officials for over a month, including the hospital network, as well as county officials for answers. 

On August 3, David Unze, a spokesperson for Sherburne County, told VICE News that the final medical report would take six to eight weeks. Checking back in on September 11, almost two months after Cristian’s death, the autopsy report still hasn’t been released. “We still have not gotten the final autopsy report from the medical examiner,” Unze wrote in an email. 

The hospital network said it could not confirm the cause of death due to patient confidentiality laws.

Making an impassioned plea at the community event, Odulia couldn’t help but break into tears.

“I will never hear ‘I love you mom. No mother should have to go through this,” she said as the community embraced her. “Why Papi? Why?”

Other attendees at the event also said that Rivera-Coba’s death is another example of the brutality faced by Black and non-white citizens in custody. After all, it’s the same city that saw the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020, which sparked civil rights protests across the nation and world.

“They're killing our people on the streets and are killing them in a jail to get Black and minority people out of the community,” activist Toshira Garraway said. “We will not lay down. We will not shut up.”

Another speaker in attendance was Del Shea Perry, whose son died in a Minnesota jail in 2018. This August, Perry received a $2.6 million settlement from a Minnesota county and Minnesota-based medical provider after she filed a wrongful death lawsuit.

“Thank you all for coming out and supporting this family and this mother who, like me, is heartbroken over the death of what happened to our son. Enough is enough.” Perry said to the crowd. 

“No one, and I mean no one, under any circumstances should leave a jail in a body bag.”

The family has set-up a GoFundMe for Cristian’s memorial, and also to hire a lawyer to help investigate the case further.

According to an open records request filed by local network KARE 11, there have been at least 50 deaths in Minnesota jails from 2015 to 2020 that are under investigation by the state’s Department of Corrections.

This month, a Minnesota state prison was put under lockdown after 100 inmates refused to go back into their cells, protesting the high temperatures that saw the area nearing 100F (37.7C).

A memorial vigil was held on Sept. 9, 2023 at the site of George Floyd’s death in downtown Minneapolis for Cristian and those protesting police brutality in and the deaths and conditions in the state’s jail houses.