Trinity County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Trinity County Correctional Facility (referred to in the county's own death reporting as the Trinity County Jail / Detention Facility)

Operated byTrinity County Sheriff's Office
County publishes a jail nameYes — Trinity County Correctional Facility is listed as a Sheriff's Office location in the county directory
Jail address701 Tom Bell Road, Weaverville, CA 96093
Housing unit named in death reportsDorm A
Custody manual publishedhttps://www.trinitycounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/1218/Trinity-County-SO-Custody-Manual-2026-PDF
Inmate handbook publishedhttps://www.trinitycounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/2764/New-Inmate-Handbook-PDF
Rated capacity72 beds

Source: Trinity County — Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-08-23

Transparency rating

3/10Closed

✓The jail is named
✗Who is in custody — not published
✗Beds and daily population — not published
✓What it costs taxpayers
✓Deaths in custody
✗PREA audits — not published
✗Independent inspection — not published
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✗How to post bond — not published
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Trinity County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-08-23. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtNot found
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
BedsNot found on the county's own site

Since then

Not found

The Sheriff

Sheriff Tim Saxon

Title as publishedSheriff/Coroner
Also serves asCounty Coroner
UndersheriffBryan Ward
Administration address101 Memorial Drive, Weaverville, CA 96093

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Trinity County — Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

Small two-judge court. The court's home page identifies the Presiding Judge; it publishes no judicial officers roster, no assistant presiding judge and no commissioners. Pages checked: https://trinity.courts.ca.gov/ and https://trinity.courts.ca.gov/divisions/criminal.

Superior Court of California, County of Trinity — Presiding Judge

Eric Heryford

Still needed

The county's bond schedule
Share of the jail population held pretrial
Median time from booking to first appearance

Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-23

The County Commissioners

They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.

What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Trinity County does have a jail, contrary to Alpine and Sierra: the Trinity County Correctional Facility at 701 Tom Bell Road, Weaverville, appears in the county directory and in the county's own in-custody death reporting.
All 439 URLs in the county's published sitemap were enumerated. There is no roster or inmate lookup (the only link offered is the statewide VINE service), no bed count or daily population, no PREA audit page, no jail inspection page, no contract or per-diem page, and no bail-posting guidance.
PREA policy appears inside the published inmate handbook, but no audit result is published.
Budget: the Auditor-Controller publishes an Annual Adopted Budget archive; the sheriff/corrections detail sits inside those budget documents.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district. Meetings are held the first and third Tuesday of each month.

What California law requires

Trinity County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. The Sheriff's Office page carries a standing document, 'Trinity County Jail In-Custody Death Reporting', which states the information 'is being provided in response to the passage of California Assembly Bill 2761'. It records three deaths in narrative form — January 14 2024, January 8 2024 and February 26 2023 — each giving the facility and the housing unit within it (Dorm A, Weaverville), race, gender and age, date, custodial status in statutory terms (awaiting arraignment, awaiting trial) and the manner and mode of death (two suicides by ligature asphyxiation; one pending investigation). The custodial agency is identified as the Trinity County Jail rather than by the full name of the Sheriff's Office.

✓The agency with custodial responsibility
✓The county where the death occurred
✓The facility — and where inside it
✓Race, gender and age
✓The date of death
✓Custodial status — awaiting arraignment, awaiting trial, or incarcerated
✓Manner and means of death

California Penal Code § 10008, enacted by AB 2761 and in force since January 2023, requires the agency with custodial responsibility to post these seven items on its own website within ten days of a death in custody, and to update them within thirty days if the facts change. California is the only state in the country with this duty. Checked 2026-08-23. This records what is published, nothing more.

The record

4 people have died in the Trinity County jail since 2020.

2 by suicide

0 illness or medical

4 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them4 of 4

Most recent death on the state's record2024-01-14

Deaths: Texas Justice Initiative, the cleaned copy of the Texas Attorney General’s custodial death reports — the state’s own public index carries no cause of death and has not been refreshed since August 2025. Population: Texas Commission on Jail Standards monthly report. Counted, not estimated.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Trinity County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).

How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?

Your VOTE is POWERFUL.

The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.

The sheriff is on your ballot

The county elections office runs the polling place in Trinity County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from the California Secretary of State and vote.gov.

Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered