At least 10 people have died in custody in Guam

How deaths in custody are reported in Guam

Guam has one level of government and no county or city jails. The Guam Police Department makes most arrests, the Department of Corrections (DOC) holds adults, and the Department of Youth Affairs runs the one youth facility.¹ DOC runs the Adult Correctional Facility in Mangilao and the Hagåtña and Federal Detention Facility, and holds people awaiting trial, people serving sentences, and federal prisoners and detainees. At the end of September 2023 it held 871 people: 55.7 percent were local detainees and 2.5 percent federal prisoners or detainees, and it reported its population at 116 percent of its beds.²

Guam has no law requiring deaths in custody to be reported.¹ The Bureau of Statistics and Plans, the territory's agency for federal justice grants, has collected reports each quarter since 2019 from the police, DOC and Youth Affairs and passed them to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), as the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act requires of grant recipients. Under DOC General Order 1.13, a death is reported up the chain to the director and to the police, DOC's internal affairs unit investigates, and quarterly reports go to the director before they are sent on. The Bureau of Statistics and Plans keeps its own spreadsheet of the reports with the names removed.¹ Its web page on the law links to its plan and to federal documents, and publishes no count.³ DOC's reports page holds only its yearly citizen-centric reports, and its report for fiscal 2023 gives no count of deaths.⁴²

Deaths become public when DOC or the police answer questions from the press, chiefly The Guam Daily Post and KUAM. Their first statements have withheld the person's name until the family was told.⁵⁶

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics collected yearly data on deaths from state prison systems from 2001 to 2019; its tables list the 50 states and the federal prisons, and no territory.⁷ Since fiscal 2020, BJA has collected death-in-custody reports from the states and territories. It publishes only tables, with no names, and it hides any count of five or fewer.⁸

What has changed

1. 1991On February 13, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the Government of Guam under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, after finding in 1987 that conditions at the Adult Correctional Facility, the Rosario Detention Facility and the inpatient unit of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse violated the constitutional rights of the people held there. The parties settled in May. The agreement covered fire safety, sanitation, and medical, dental and mental health care.⁹
2. 2015At about 6 p.m. on June 22, Ti Dasi, 23, was found hanging in a single cell at Post 5, where he was held pending a security classification. He died at the U.S. Naval Hospital.¹⁰
3. 2017On April 13, the District Court of Guam dismissed the Justice Department's case, ending 26 years of federal oversight of the prison.⁹
4. 2019Guam began reporting deaths in custody to BJA under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act.¹
5. 2022On the evening of July 31, Cezar Beda Dizon, 69, was stabbed in the Minimum-In unit at Mangilao, which houses people allowed out on work details, and was pronounced dead at the Naval Hospital. DOC first described him only as a 69-year-old man.⁵¹¹ An internal investigation found that the officer assigned to the unit had followed all supervision policies.¹² In October, Michael John Mendiola Jr., 45, became ill at DOC and died at Guam Memorial Hospital.¹²
6. 2023On April 10, an officer found a 36-year-old man unresponsive; he was pronounced dead at Guam Memorial Hospital, and police said there had been no foul play. A second man, admitted to the same hospital from DOC on April 27 for what the department called "an undisclosed medical condition," died there on April 29. DOC announced his death on May 8. By The Guam Daily Post's count, four people had died in DOC custody in less than a year.¹²
7. 2024On May 17, a 26-year-old man held at DOC was found unconscious and was pronounced dead at the Naval Hospital at about 11:45 p.m. DOC Director Fred Bordallo said the autopsy found methamphetamine, amphetamine and fentanyl.¹³
8. 2025In January, a federal detainee died in DOC custody, and DOC opened an internal affairs investigation.¹⁴ Police officers were called to DOC at 12:05 a.m. on June 15 for the death of a man held there, whom they did not name.⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Guam publishes no count of deaths in custody, so there is nothing official to check the news against. The reporting that does exist rests on cooperation rather than law. The territory's own plan lists six agencies that can arrest or hold people and were not taking part: the Judiciary of Guam's Marshals Division, the Port Authority Police, the Airport Police, the Customs and Quarantine Agency, the Department of Agriculture's law enforcement division and the Department of Parks and Recreation. It calls the reporting a collateral duty for staff who "may not have the time, knowledge or the skill sets" to get it right, and says that without a law the reporting may be incomplete.¹

The plan says Youth Affairs reported no deaths of young people in its custody from 2020 on.¹ For adults, whatever the territory reports to BJA is hidden by BJA's rule against publishing counts of five or fewer.⁸ Of the people reported in the press to have died in DOC custody since 2022, I have found the names of two.¹¹¹²