Share and Follow
Christian Doran Walker, inset, was declared dead on April 15, 2023, in a Nevada prison. (Inset photos of the victim from the family’s lawyer; Prison photo from State of Nevada Department of Corrections.)
A lawsuit alleges a cover-up by authorities in Nevada after a prisoner who allegedly died at the hands of corrections officers was found naked in a pool of blood on a prison cell floor.
Christian Doran Walker, 44, was declared dead on April 15, 2023, after a prison porter delivering his dinner found him moaning in a fetal position in his cell at the High Desert State Prison outside Las Vegas, according to the lawsuit filed by Walker’s mother Thursday in Clark County.
“A man that should be alive was murdered,” said the mother’s attorney, James Urrutia, local CBS affiliate KLAS reported after the death. “You don’t get over the loss of a child.”
Court documents said the facts about Walker’s death made no sense. The Clark County Coroner found he had died of natural causes. An “unsubstantiated” investigation resulted in no punishment for any correctional officers, the lawsuit said.
“Christian’s death was being swept under the rug — a rug that already contains many unusual inmate deaths in Nevada prisons,” court documents said.
Named in the lawsuit as defendants are the state Department of Corrections and its director, James Dzurenda, several prison administrators, medical staff, guards, and the Clark County coroner’s office.
A media representative from the corrections department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime. The county declined to comment.
Court documents lay out the timeline of Walker’s last days. He’d spent most of his life in prison. He had been serving 28 years to life with parole after his second-degree murder conviction for the 1997 killing of his 17-year-old girlfriend. She was shot in the head four times, and her body was found in the desert, the Las Vegas Sun reported in 2001 when Walker lost the appeal of his case to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Court documents said he had been a model prisoner and had been nearing the end of his sentence when he died.
The series of events leading to his death started the first week of April 2023 when he was at the Southern Desert Correctional Center. He notified medical staff he was experiencing what he believed to be poisoning with extreme paranoia, headaches, loss of train of thought, and other symptoms. He was given medical tests at the facility, then, for unknown reasons over an undisclosed incident, he was transferred to the prison where he would die days later, court documents said.
On April 13, 2023, he was allegedly beaten with batons and sprayed with pepper spray so severely that he lost consciousness and had to be taken to a trauma hospital in Las Vegas.
Hospital intake records said he was assaulted with unknown objects to the head, face, right lower extremity and right arm, court documents said. A first responder reported he may have been hit with a baton to the back of the head and that Walker did not remember what happened to him, the lawsuit said. Doctors treated him for cuts on his scalp, lip, and shin. Walker needed 17 stitches in total, according to court documents. He also had a fracture — a defensive injury on his pinkie that required a splint. He also had a head wound. After four hours at the hospital, he was discharged into police custody and returned to High Desert State Prison, court documents said.
The next day, he was assaulted with batons a second time, the lawsuit alleges.
A fellow prisoner delivering Walker’s 6 p.m. dinner made the grim discovery. The cell door was open, so the porter walked in and found him moaning under the bed frame in a fetal position — blood and bruises down his back and legs, ignored by officers, medical staff and the administration, the lawsuit alleges.
At 6:30 the following morning, a first responder received an alert that there was a cardiac arrest at the prison. When that first responder arrived, he found Walker in a treatment room where prison staff had been attempting CPR on him. His face was badly swollen and bruised, the first responder noted, according to the lawsuit.
“Prison staff stated they found the patient at 0600 am in his cell, in cardiac arrest,” the first responder noted, according to the lawsuit. “CPR was reported to have been started and ongoing since. Prison staff told me they had no idea how the patient sustained these injuries.”
After a call to consult an emergency room doctor at a nearby hospital, it was determined that “all lifesaving measures failed,” and Walker was declared dead at 7:18 a.m. He had died sometime the previous night due to the signs of death found by the first responder, the lawsuit said.
Even though photos showed his badly beaten body — images that the lawsuit said would “shock the average human” — the medical examiner concluded Walker’s death was natural due to heart disease, court documents said, even though he had no history of heart problems, his mother’s lawyer said.
The lawyer had a forensic pathologist review the autopsy and medical records and recommended a re-evaluation of the death, court documents said.
“The circumstances of death coupled with the findings described in the autopsy do not support Hypertensive Cardiovascular Disease as the cause of death,” the pathologist, Lary Simms, wrote in his report. “Rather, the circumstances of death coupled with the findings described in the autopsy report support blunt head trauma as the cause of death. Based on the autopsy description, this 44 yo white male Christian Walker died as a result of Cerebral Edema [Brain Swelling] due to Blunt Head Trauma due to Assault.”
The lawsuit alleged that after Walker’s death, prison leadership “conspired to destroy, create, and modify” Christian’s medical records. The lawsuit says the leadership conspired with the Clark County coroner to “ensure the cause of death was ‘natural,’ not from blunt force trauma.”
The lawsuit alleges that the cover up is part of a yearslong pattern “to ensure the true cause of inmates deaths are hidden from the public.”
“Over the decades, many unusual inmate deaths have occurred with a similar coroner report finding of death by ‘natural’ causes,” court documents said. “NDOC leadership’s efforts to conceal the cause of inmate deaths results in the retention of aggressive, untrained, and poor correctional officers. It also creates an environment in the Nevada prisons that encourages Correctional officers to violently beat inmates.”
