Sixth Prisoner Dies in CT Custody: New Haven Jail Death

A 33-year-old New Haven man died by apparent suicide at the Whalley Avenue jail Thursday, the sixth person to die in state Department of Correction custody since February.

Gamboy Guaranda was found in his cell at the New Haven Correctional Center around 8 a.m. Thursday. DOC spokesperson Andrius Banevicius laid out what happened in a Friday press release: a correction officer on routine patrol spotted a covered cell window and got no answer at the door. When staff entered, they found Guaranda “unresponsive, with a bed sheet tied around his neck.” The sheet was secured to the cell door. He was alone.

Officers cut the ligature and began emergency measures. Paramedics rushed him to a hospital. A physician pronounced him dead at 8:37 a.m.

“While conducting a routine tour, a correction officer came upon a cell window that had been covered, obstructing the view into the cell,” Banevicius said.

State police and the state inspector general are both investigating. The medical examiner’s office will determine the official cause of death.

A Man Awaiting Trial

Court records show New Haven police arrested Guaranda on Aug. 13, 2025, on felony charges of first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a child. He’d pleaded not guilty. He was being held on a $250,000 bond, with his next scheduled court date on June 2. He didn’t make it to that date.

The Sixth Death Since February

Six deaths in roughly ten weeks. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a pattern, and it’s the kind of pattern that can’t stay buried in agency press releases forever.

Guaranda’s death came after that of Craig Whyte, a 45-year-old New Havener and Jamaican immigrant found unresponsive at Osborn Correctional Institution on March 22 and later pronounced dead. Friends and family knew Whyte as “Sizzla.” State police are investigating his death too.

Each death adds weight to what’s become a mounting accountability crisis for a department that was already catching heat from reform advocates across the state. The New Haven Independent has tracked how pressure from families and organizers has grown as the deaths have accumulated, including from Hill neighborhood resident Lisa Velasquez-Torres, who’s been pushing to expose conditions at Osborn where her brother is held. Mice. Mold. Inadequate medical care. Her account isn’t unique.

It’s worth stepping back for a moment. Connecticut holds roughly 10,000 people in custody on any given day, according to DOC population data. Most aren’t serving life sentences. They’ve got families, they’ve got court dates, they’ve got lives waiting on the other side of those walls. When six of them die in custody inside of ten weeks, the state doesn’t get to call that a statistical anomaly. That’s a crisis requiring answers.

The Commissioner Is Leaving

Gov. Ned Lamont announced recently that the DOC commissioner plans to step down in May 2026. Don’t read that as coincidence. The announcement landed amid scrutiny of the department that’s reached a level almost impossible to ignore, even in a political climate where prison conditions rarely crack the front page in Connecticut.

Prison deaths won’t dominate every news cycle. That’s the brutal reality of how this state’s political press works. But the numbers here are hard to wave away: six deaths since February 2026, a departing commissioner, and a department operating a jail on Whalley Avenue in New Haven where a 33-year-old man charged with a crime but not yet convicted managed to die alone in a covered cell before his June court date ever came.

Guaranda was 33. His case number shows an arrest date of 13 August 2025. He was, legally speaking, still innocent. He won’t be in court on June 2.