On July 24, 20-year-old Brayan Torres of Nogales drowned in Patagonia Lake on a day off with his family and friends. Torres had been employed as a corrections officer with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for a little over a year.

Torres is the sixth Pima County corrections officer, or CO, to die in the last eight months. The officers’ causes of death range from accidental drowning, in the case of Torres, to suicide, cancer and other unspecified “medical” issues, according to data provided by the PCSD. Two more retired officers died from cancer during that same time period.

“It’s been very hard on the people that work at the jail. These are their friends. They’ve grown up with these people,” said PCSD Lt. Heather Lappin, the Republican challenger to Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos in November’s election. “It’s just been surreal,” Lappin said.

Lappin is the coordinator for the PCSD’s Wellness Division, formed last year. The Wellness Division provides counseling to employees after the death of a staff member, among other services.

“We’re going to need a wellness team for our wellness team,” Nanos said, “because they’ve just been seeing so much of this.”

The sheriff said the department only recently began keeping track of CO deaths, so they do not have data from previous years to compare, though he said the recent number “does seem unusual.”

The Pima County Adult Detention Complex,1270 W. Silverlake Rd., employs about 423 corrections officers overseeing a population of around 1,600 inmates, Nanos said this summer.

The Sheriff’s Department has had numerous difficulties hiring at the jail in the past few years. In 2022, Nanos told the Pima County Board of Supervisors he lost 30 percent of his employees in a year. At one point, three COs were quitting their jobs every week. 

Now, Nanos says, he’s fully staffed at the authorized level, though recruiting and retaining COs is still a challenge.

Research has long proved that corrections officers suffer from higher rates of physical and mental illness than other groups. A 2009 study of officers in New Jersey found that corrections officers commit suicide at a rate double police officers and five and a half times the general population.

Another study from 1983 found COs are more likely to have high blood pressure than other professions, and are two and a half times more likely to develop heart disease than police officers.

Arizona has the highest concentration of corrections officers of any state in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Arizona employs 13,260 corrections officers at a median hourly wage of $26.12.

“It’s a hard job,” Nanos told the Sentinel in an interview last December. “How many people say, ‘Oh, I want to be a corrections officer when I grow up?’”