The man accused in the fatal beating of his cellmate at the Clackamas County Jail this month allegedly attacked a previous cellmate days earlier as that man slept, the victim told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a jailhouse interview.
Sapastian Year, 23, was arraigned in Clackamas County Circuit Court Tuesday on allegations of first-degree murder and harassment for the beating death of Reece Richeson, 26, who was in jail on drug and property crime charges.
His court-appointed lawyer, Brian Schmonsees, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
Richeson’s death in custody raises significant questions about how long it took jail staff to intervene in the assault, how staff make decisions about detainees’ cell assignments and whether they considered the potential safety risk of placing Year with a cellmate after his alleged unprovoked attack on another man.
Juan Chavez, an attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center whose work focuses on prisoner rights and prison conditions, said the case raises the possibility that jail staff missed “warning signs” when they opted to place Year with Richeson.
“How that got through any screening process, I just don’t know,” he said.
Sheriff’s Deputy John Wildhaber did not directly address a question about why jail staff moved Year into a cell with Richeson after allegations of an earlier attack on a cellmate. Wildhaber said only that Year and Richeson were moved into the same disciplinary unit because of unspecified misconduct.
Year allegedly beat Richeson on Oct. 18 in an assault so explosively violent that one attorney said other men in the unit tried to quickly summon help — to no avail.
Richeson died at OHSU Hospital in the early morning hours of Oct. 21, sheriff’s officials said.
Year and Richeson had been cellmates for about a week. Jail officials moved Year into the cell with Richeson on Oct. 10, one day after Year allegedly attacked William Maupin, 30, as he slept, according to court records and Maupin.
In a video interview from jail, Maupin told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Year attacked him the same day the two were assigned to share a cell.
“That dude attacked me in my sleep, within like, the first two hours that I was housed with him,” Maupin said. “He was, like, hearing voices or something.”
“He hit me in the face, he kicked me in the face, and he tried to box me in to make it so I couldn’t fight,” Maupin added. “But I grabbed him with my legs and started hitting him back. So maybe he might have hurt me bad if I didn’t fight back. I wasn’t gonna just let him hit me.”
The subsequent attack on Richeson left other men in the unit shaken.
Zachary VanHook, 34, heard the “very loud” attack on Richeson from the adjacent cell, according to his lawyer, Michael Tyner.
Tyner said VanHook “could basically hear the beating going down” and VanHook told him that other men in the housing unit are “pretty torn up by what they were able to hear and potentially see.”
“He’s been in the system a long time and he made some comments that fights always get broken up real quick and this one is one where it went on for a long time,” Tyner said. “He said they were all pressing their (emergency) buttons on their cells” and yet VanHook told him that jail staff failed to intervene quickly.
Wildhaber declined to answer questions about how long it took jail staff to respond to the assault.
Wildhaber said the sheriff’s office, not an outside agency, is investigating Richeson’s death. He said the agency also plans a “standard review of jail policies and procedures.”
The Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office has been slow to release information about Richeson’s death, publicly disclosing details late Monday only after questions from The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Wildhaber said the agency does not have a policy requiring the public disclosure of jail deaths. In the past five years, he said the jail had seen five deaths prior to Richeson, one in 2020, three in 2021 and one in 2022. None were tied to assaults by other people in custody, he said.
The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office publicly discloses deaths of people in custody in press releases, per agency policy. Spokesperson Brent Weisberg said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive that the sheriff’s office “remains committed to transparency regarding in-custody death investigations and helping to ensure the public is notified in a timely manner.”
At the state level, the Oregon Department of Corrections also announces every death in custody.
Wildhaber did not respond to questions about whether Sheriff Angela Brandenburg would revisit the lack of a policy on disclosing deaths of people in custody.
Chavez, the prisoner rights lawyer, said the public should be informed of jail deaths, especially when they occur as a result of violence.
“The public deserves to know that,” he said. “I can’t think of a good reason to keep that secret.”
Richeson was booked into jail Oct. 5 on a first-degree criminal mischief charge for vandalizing a hardware store, the sheriff’s office said. He also faced additional drug and property crime charges, court records show.
Year was booked into jail Sept. 26 on allegations of criminal mischief and violating a stalking order.
Late last year, a woman who lived in an apartment near Year on Southeast Causey Avenue sought a stalking protective order against him, detailing numerous encounters with Year at the door to her apartment, court records show. She wrote that Year approached her on multiple occasions and seemed interested in her young child. She told the court she feared for her family’s safety. Records show the court granted the woman’s request.
Last month, Year was accused of violating the order, according to court filings. He faced four counts of violating the order and a criminal mischief charge. According to the indictment, Year waited outside the woman’s home and also damaged it; details of the allegations are not in the court record.
Portland police records show that in 2023 Year allegedly threatened his parents and sister. According to a probable cause affidavit written by a Portland police officer, Year arrived at his parents’ apartment “drunk and high” on Jan. 1, 2023, and broke a window screen, damaged property and threatened to stab his sister and mother.
Two officers “used their bodies to block (Year) from attempting to stab his family,” the record says. During the encounter, Year held what turned out to be a potato peeler, the officer wrote.
He was accused of one count of menacing; the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office later dismissed the charge.
On Tuesday, Year pleaded not guilty during an arraignment hearing, where a Chuukese language interpreter was on hand to help him navigate the proceeding. He remains at the jail and is being held without bail.
The charge of first-degree murder applies to cases where the victim is killed in custody; the crime carries a sentence of life with the possibility of parole after 30 years or a true life sentence.
