Retired California Prison Guard Killed in Colorado Jail
A complaint filed in federal court for the District of Colorado on March 26, 2025, accused guards at the Huerfano County Jail of needlessly assaulting a detainee suffering a mental health crisis and then ignoring him for another week as he slowly died from his injuries. Ironically, the detainee, Michael Burch, 69, was a retired prison guard who worked for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for 23 years.
Burch was booked into the Huerfano County lockup on March 25, 2023, after allegedly making threats with a rubber mallet at unnamed fellow citizens in the tiny town of Walsenberg (pop. 3,085). Though jail staffers agreed his behavior wasn’t rational, he wasn’t given a mental health evaluation. Instead, on his third day in the jail, guards assaulted him after observing him in his cell with a small pencil.
There was no one else in the cell with him at the time, but guards Stuart Pino and Cpt. Lea Vigil demanded that he drop the pencil. Their body-worn cameras and surveillance video recorded what happened next: Pinot shot Burch with a Taser and then tackled him onto a bench. The detainee cried out in pain. But a jail nurse watching from the cell door made no evaluation, circling her finger by her head as she mouthed to the guards, “He’s batshit.”
Paramedics were summoned but performed only a cursory examination, refusing Burch’s pleas for transport to a hospital. The guards then taped black plastic over the cell door window and left him alone, except when he requested pain medication and Vigil dropped a bottle of water in his cell. Ignored for the next six days, Burch finally fell over on April 3, 2023, his head hitting the floor with a loud thud. A guard who found his body about five hours later radioed to a colleague, “This guy’s frozen, bro.”
An autopsy determined that Burch had suffered multiple rib fractures and a collapsed lung, leaving blood pooling in his intestines over his final week. His death was ruled a homicide. But then-district attorney Henry Solano declined to press charges, unwilling to fight the guards’ argument that they acted in self-defense.
With the aid of attorneys from Rathrod Mohamedbhai LLC in Denver, the personal representative of Burch’s estate, Linda McMillan, filed claims under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Colorado constitution, accusing jailers of excessive force, failure to intervene and deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs, also seeking to hold Sheriff Bruce Newman liable for failure to train his jail staff.
CDCR said that Burch was hired in 1985 and worked as a guard at California Correctional Institution and California Men’s Colony before a transfer to the Correctional Training Facility for the last nine years of his career. Recalling how Burch’s “every breath got shorter and shorter and shorter until there were no more breaths to take,” Omeed Azmoudeh, one of the Estate’s attorneys, called it “truly the thing of nightmares.” See: Est. of Burch v. Bd. of Cty. Comms. for Cty. of Huerfano, USDC (D. Colo.), Case No. 1:25-cv-00975.
Additional source: Colorado Public Radio
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