$500,000 for Mentally Ill Detainee Beaten by Guard at Ohio Jail
by Chuck Sharman
Under a consent judgment entered in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on July 26, 2026, former Lorain County Jail guard Ruben Ortiz accepted a $500,000 liability for beating mentally ill detainee Charles Koch, Jr. while he was awaiting transfer to a state psychiatric hospital in August 2023.
Koch, then 34, had earlier been found not guilty of an assault by reason of insanity and placed on medications that he then stopped taking, prompting a judge to order his transfer to the psychiatric hospital. He was at the jail awaiting that and partially restrained when surveillance video captured Ortiz, then 52, throw the detainee head-first into a brick wall, punching him in the face repeatedly before he rammed Koch’s head into a bench and took him to the ground.
In October 2023, Ortiz was charged with a pair of misdemeanors for the assault and a falsified incident report he submitted to cover it up. Sheriff Phil Stammitti fired him a month later; the following June, Ortiz pleaded no contest to the charges, receiving a 30-day jail sentence and $500 in fines, WOIO in Cleveland reported.
Meanwhile, with the aid of Elyria attorney Steve Albenze, Koch filed suit in the district court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in January 2024. The suit accused Ortiz of violating the detainee’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights with the beat down. It also sought to hold Stammitti and his jailers liable for maintaining a de facto custom of tolerating excessive force by guards, as provided under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Svcs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978). In support, Koch offered evidence of no less than five such incidents involving Ortiz since 2005—including an assault on another restrained mentally ill detainee, Steven Conley, that resulted in a $30,000 settlement in November 2019, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, July 2024, p.16.]
But when Defendants moved for summary judgment, the district court agreed that “[e]ven if there was widespread use of excessive force, the record does not support a finding that there was a custom of tolerating it.” Finding that Koch’s Monell claim therefore failed, the district court granted Defendants’ summary judgment motion on October 31, 2025. That left only Koch’s claims against Ortiz, which the parties proceeded to settle, memorializing their terms in the consent judgment—which stayed the damages payout against Ortiz, instructing Koch to seek recovery from the County Risk Sharing Authority (CORSA). See: Koch v. Ortiz, USDC (N.D. Ohio), Case No. 1:24-cv-00031.
The settlement follows another $5.7 million payout that Lorain County agreed to make in June 2026 to yet another detainee brutalized at the lockup. As PLN also reported, Jeffrey Fry reached that settlement after suffering a spinal cord injury when guard Brian Tellier threw him head-first into a wall in May 2023. Fry got another $750,000 from LifeCare Ambulance, whose emergency responders failed to take precautions to avoid making the injury worse. Tellier was later fired for an unrelated cause by Stammitti’s successor, Sheriff Jack Hall. He has since inaugurated the new position of Inspector General in the County Corrections Department to investigate misconduct allegations against jail staff. [See: PLN, Aug. 2026, p.25.]
Additional source: WOIO
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