San Luis Obispo County reaches $8 million settlement in teen death

Eight million dollars. That is the price San Luis Obispo County and its mental health contractor have agreed to pay for the night 19-year-old Elina Branco of Paso Robles spent dying, unnoticed, inside a facility that was supposed to keep her safe.

As CalCoastNews reported, the county and Sierra Mental Wellness Group settled the wrongful death lawsuit in June for $8 million, to be allocated to Branco's parents, Linda Cooper and Jeffrey Branco, Jr. The settlement closes a chapter on a tragedy that exposed deep failures in a facility the county opened with promise — and that staff had warned about for months before anyone died.

A mother's plea for overnight supervision

The story began, as these stories so often do, with a family trying to do everything right.

On May 15, 2024, emergency medical personnel rushed Branco to French Hospital Medical Center in San Luis Obispo after a drug overdose, according to CalCoastNews. At the hospital, staff administered multiple doses of Narcan to reverse the overdose. Her mother, Linda Cooper, began arranging admission to a dual-diagnosis rehabilitation facility — a program equipped to treat both addiction and mental illness together.

The transfer would take until the next morning. Cooper asked that her daughter be closely monitored overnight in the interim.

Jason Hooson, part of the county's Mental Health Evaluation Team, assured Cooper her daughter would receive round-the-clock supervision in a safe, protective environment at a county four-bed facility, CalCoastNews reported. Twelve hours later, at 6:08 p.m., medical staff transported Branco to the SLO County Crisis Stabilization Unit.

Hooson's own intake notes, later cited in the lawsuit, make wrenching reading: "Client requires close monitoring, support and supervision to prevent recurrence of what likely would have been her death," he wrote. "Parent indicates that she believes client would use again if she were not directly transferred/admitted and fears client will overdose."

A night of falsified checks

What happened next, according to the reporting and court filings, amounted to a cascade of failures.

As part of the unit's intake procedure, staff should have searched Branco for contraband and required her to change into facility clothing. They did neither. Staff were also required to check on her every two hours. Instead, employees allegedly went to sleep.

The chart logs tell the story in chilling repetition. At 11:30 p.m. on May 15, and again at 1:30, 3:30 and 5:30 a.m. on May 16, the entries are identical: "Engaged in therapeutic rest without incident. Breathing is even and unlabored. Will continue to monitor for any changes."

The coroner later calculated that Branco died sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight — meaning those entries were almost certainly written about a young woman who was already gone.

Between 8 and 8:30 a.m., an employee noticed Branco was not breathing and that her body was cold. The employee called for a defibrillator. Its battery was dead. There was no registered nurse or other medically trained staff on site who could have recognized or responded to a drug-related medical emergency; instead, according to CalCoastNews, a registered nurse signed off after the fact on statements from the psychiatric technicians who had allegedly been asleep.

"She would still be alive if not admitted to the crisis stabilization unit," one unit employee told CalCoastNews shortly after Branco's death. "It is so bad the clients are in danger."

A facility born from an earlier tragedy

The Crisis Stabilization Unit itself was created in response to loss. After the deaths of several mentally ill patients in county custody — including Andrew Holland, whose family previously received a $5 million settlement — the county opened the unit in 2018 to serve community members "experiencing a serious mental health issue," contracting its day-to-day management to Sierra Mental Wellness Group.

But staff had complained for months about mismanagement at the facility before Branco died, CalCoastNews reported. Her death prompted four employees to resign, and several came forward to the outlet, which exclusively reported on the failures at the unit.

Who bears the responsibility?

The lawsuit, filed in federal court by attorney Cameron Sehat on Cooper's behalf, named SLO County, Sierra Mental Wellness Group and eight of the group's employees, citing "a custom, practice, and failure to train that resulted in chronic understaffing, absent nursing coverage, routinely admitting a client of higher acuity than reasonably safe to manage, unenforced overnight welfare check policies, and falsified monitoring records."

The county's attorneys argued the county bore no responsibility, blaming Sierra entirely. But emails obtained during litigation showed county employees knew the crisis unit was not properly staffed before Branco's death — a fact that undercut the argument that the county could simply contract away its duty to provide adequate mental health services.

"Plaintiffs contend the county was independently responsible for the incident because it had a non-delegable duty to provide constitutionally adequate mental health services to the public," Sehat wrote, noting additional claims under the Elder and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act and state wrongful death law.

The suit sought not only damages but the closure of the facility. Shortly after it was filed, the county shuttered the unit.

What an $8 million settlement can and cannot do

The settlement brings a measure of accountability — and of financial acknowledgment — to a Paso Robles family that trusted the county with a daughter in her most fragile hours. But money cannot restore what Linda Cooper asked for on May 15, 2024: a pair of eyes on her daughter through the night, and a morning transfer to treatment that never came.

For San Luis Obispo County residents, the case leaves hard questions about oversight of contracted public services, and about who is watching when the most vulnerable among us are placed in the county's care. Those questions did not settle along with the lawsuit.