Colin Conner’s booking photos are a flipbook of how addiction and being homeless in Salt Lake City aged him, his curly blond hair wilder and longer with each arrest, his face thinner.
Last spring, he had started taking methadone, trying to break his dependence on opioids. And after Conner pleaded guilty to a probation violation in May, a judge agreed he could be released early from a 30-day jail sentence to go to drug treatment. His attorney said he expected a bed to be available immediately, and Conner’s family was hopeful that he was ready for change.
Conner was instead released early, to the streets, just after 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Six days later, workers with a landscaping crew were the first to notice that something had gone wrong.
A port-a-potty at their work site in the Central Ninth neighborhood had been locked for hours, they realized. After they called police, an officer found an unresponsive man inside, lying face down on his hands and knees, according to his report.
Medics and firefighters soon confirmed Conner, 32, was dead. The medical examiner concluded he died of an accidental drug overdose after mixing fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Conner apparently fell through a crack that advocates and others have identified and tried to close — the gap that opens when people ask or are ordered to go to drug treatment but end up released to the streets instead, without a handoff or other assistance.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Litter is seen in an alleyway on Monday, Jan. 22, 2024, at the approximate location where Colin Conner was found dead in June 2023.
It’s not the role of prosecutors or jail staff to coordinate communication or access to treatment, said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill. Instead, it’s generally left up to defense attorneys, agreed Rich Mauro, executive director of the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association.
But unexpected complications can pop up — like an earlier-than-expected release, or delays that mean a person’s sentence expires and they’re simply let out, Mauro explained.
Records show Conner was released days earlier than scheduled for good behavior. He walked out of jail just after 5 a.m. on June 3, about two hours before the daily arrival of attorneys and advocates who can usually offer help.
There’s no policy that requires or suggests the jail alert defense attorneys when someone is released early, said Neal Hamilton, Conner’s court-ordered defense attorney. The jail considers such notifications “a security risk,” he said. Defense attorneys find out a client has been released “when/if” they call, he said.
Salt Lake County jail officials, Conner’s defense attorney and Gill, whose office prosecuted Conner, all declined to comment on how he ended up on the streets instead of in treatment. The jail, through its spokesperson Lt. Cole Warnick, told The Salt Lake Tribune it had no more to say.
“Due to the potential threat of litigation, our legal counsel has advised we discontinue commenting on this matter,” Warnick wrote.
Conner’s father, Jon Tyler Conner, believes the criminal justice system failed his son in two ways: His abrupt release without support, and the fact that the jail had stopped his doses of methadone — even though it used the same provider Conner had connected with, Project Reality, for its medication-assisted treatment program.
He went through withdrawal in jail, records show. That can reduce a person’s previous tolerance, experts say, which leaves them vulnerable to accidentally overdosing if they use drugs again, like Conner did.
A fateful court date
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) The entrance to the Salt Lake County jail is photographed Monday, Jan. 22, 2024.
Hamilton had been determined to get Conner help. He hoped that if Conner admitted to violating the terms of his probation in an earlier credit card theft case, he could use that admission to get 3rd District Judge James D. Gardner to get Conner into treatment.
In April, Hamilton had even asked for more time before sentencing, to make sure there were no other holds — orders to keep someone in jail for other charges — “that would get in the way of his release to in-patient treatment,” according to courtroom audio obtained by The Tribune.
“We’re good to go,” Hamilton told the judge at the May 9 hearing.
Conner admitted to the probation violation that day, and when Hamilton asked the judge to agree to his early release — to go into effect as soon as a bed at Odyssey House opened up — Hamilton said he anticipated a bed “should be available immediately.”
Gardner obliged. It was exactly the sentence his mother, Brenda Conner, had asked for more than a year earlier, when Colin had been arrested on a warrant for not showing up for a hearing in the credit card case.
“I am emailing you to ask for consideration in sentencing Colin Yeager Conner … to rehab, if that is possible,” she had written to the judge in November 2021. She hadn’t spoken to Conner in years, she wrote, but he’d called her asking for bail money.
She had resolved not to bail him out, hoping that this time, jail would be a step toward getting his life together. So had the rest of his family. They thought it would be good for him.
“Although it desperately tugs on a mama[’]s heartstrings, [paying his bond] will not change anything for him in his life,” she said.
Conner was released to pretrial services 11 days after that booking, meaning he was allowed to leave without posting bail and would have been scheduled to meet with a case manager. He was in and out of jail three more times over the next year because of warrants for missing court hearings and later for a probation violation — always released soon after booking.
Last March, Conner was again arrested for violating probation. He received his last dose of methadone on March 13.
When he was booked the next day, he stopped receiving the drug. Jail records show that’s when staff began withdrawal protocols, where nurses monitor an inmate more closely — about two months before Hamilton sought his opportuinity for an early release.
An opportunity, there and gone
(Conner family) Colin Conner photographed in 2011. He first arrived in Salt Lake City in 2014.
Conner arrived in Salt Lake City in October 2014. The Washington state native had struggled with drugs since he was young, according to his father, who goes by Ty.
His parents think a high school classmate gave him his first OxyContin pill at age 15, his father said. Two years later, Conner took some of the codeine prescribed to his sister after her tonsillectomy, Ty Conner said, and that was the year his drug use became obvious to his family.
By 19, Conner was in rehab in California. He spent the next three years in and out of treatment.
Salt Lake City was supposed to be a new beginning. He had a cousin living here, with a stable family life and a job who could help support him, and he had relatives in nearby Denver, Ty Conner said.
Utah also offered the outdoor recreation Conner enjoyed, particularly snowboarding. And Ty Conner thought that some combination of the winter weather being too cold for him to sleep on the streets, like he had done before in California, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ charity and influence, would keep him out of trouble.
“I just had a lot of faith that it could be a positive place for him to be, and he agreed and was excited,” Ty Conner said.
Everything seemed mostly OK for Conner’s first four years in Utah. He had a roommate in Draper, and worked odd jobs to get by. But by around 2018, it became obvious that he was using opioids again, and Conner had to move out. That’s when he went back to living on the streets, Ty Conner said.
Two years later, records show, Conner started being regularly booked at the Salt Lake County jail, mostly for low-level offenses, like trespassing and drug possession.
By the time Gardner sentenced him last May, Conner was excited for the opportunity to go into treatment, what he called a “new lease on life,” his father said. Medical records that he obtained corroborate Conner’s optimism, labeling him as “future-oriented” and “want[ing] to work,” Ty Conner said.
“This is the first time in a long time, probably 10 years,” his father said, “that he has been verified to be without any substances. And now he’s got a 32-year-old brain. Not a 22-year-old brain.”
But when he left jail 25 days after his sentencing, Connor would have walked through a common area that houses the Jail Resource and Reentry Program — which exists solely to catch people as they leave and offer them help and resources.
The office, which operates 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, wasn’t yet open.
‘Agency can lead to tragedy’
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) The entrance to the Salt Lake County jail, which Colin Conner was released from on June 3, 2023. He died six days later.
The Utah state courts system doesn’t track how often judges allow defendants to be released early from jail and enter treatment, according to spokesperson Tania Mashburn.
The Tribune asked to speak with Gardner or any judges about what they generally expect to happen in cases like Conner’s. Mashburn declined an interview. She noted: “Judges are not allowed to speak on specific cases, and are usually not permitted to do interviews at all.”
Mauro, of the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, said that for a defendant to receive an order for early release to treatment, their attorney would first need to determine if their client is eligible and could benefit from treatment outside a jail setting.
Then, they’d likely contact a facility to make sure it has space available and will accept their client. The attorney would next have to ask a judge for an order of release to that facility.
It’s the attorney’s responsibility — and in the Legal Defenders Association’s case, their social services team — to coordinate transportation arrangements at the jail and get the client to treatment before the sentence expires, Mauro said.
Odyssey House’s chief operating officer, Christina Zidow, said her staff regularly goes to jails and prisons to pick up inmates for treatment, and has coordinated specific days that they will arrive at some jails to transport van loads of inmates. Sometimes, the corrections staff will transport an inmate themselves, she said; sometimes a defense attorney will.
Zidow said staff tries to supervise an inmate from “door to door,” because there’s “so much opportunity to get lost in between the two spots.” That was more common about five years ago, she said, but “we’ve worked really, really hard to facilitate that process as well as we possibly can.”
Mauro agreed. The “best practice,” he said, would be “a direct warm handoff, and that’s typically what our intent is. … And I think that’s typically the way it happens in most circumstances.”
One wrinkle, he said, is when a defendant has a warrant or “hold” in a separate case. That means they cannot be released from custody without clearance from the judge in that case, which may be in another jurisdiction or a lower court. This stalls their release — and sometimes, the issue is not resolved before their sentence expires.
At that point, the jail has no legal authority to hold them any longer and must release them.
Gill said it’s also possible inmates may not make it to treatment because they simply declined and opted to wait out the rest of their sentence.
He said prosecutors don’t care how the sentence plays out. If a defendant serves the imposed jail time, that works. If they go to treatment instead, that works too.
It’s not clear what happened in Conner’s case.
Zidow said there are generally beds available for people who need them. Courtroom audio indicates Hamilton was under the impression there would be one available for Conner.
Yet jail officials and Gill, whose office serves as the jail’s legal counsel, told The Tribune in interviews or in emails obtained via open records requests that Conner’s release comported with jail policy.
Hamilton said in an email that he didn’t know why Conner didn’t make it to Odyssey House, writing, “The details are confidential.”
He said there were no orders to hold Conner when Gardner ordered his early release. Two justice court holds appeared after the order was handed down, however.
Hamilton added that getting a client to treatment is “complicated.”
“Addiction is a horrible disease, and agency can lead to tragedy. Even with all the resources in the world, people have to make the choice to take advantage of them,” Hamilton wrote. “We do our absolute best to help, but we sometimes see tragedy despite our best efforts.”
Higher overdose risk for recently released inmates
If Conner had been getting his prescribed methadone treatments before he was released early from jail, his father thinks his son would still be alive.
Warnick declined to say why Colin didn’t continue receiving the drug through the jail’s medication-assisted treatment program.
He did say that the jail partners with Project Reality to dose approximately 23 inmates per day with methadone, and that prescriptions can only be given if verified. Ty Conner said the jail never verified Conner’s prescription.
Project Reality did not return The Tribune’s multiple calls and emails for more information on their program.
The Salt Lake County jail is one of the few in Utah with such a program. This sort of treatment saves lives, said MacKenzie Bray, executive director of the Salt Lake Harm Reduction Project.
Research shows that recently released inmates are at particularly high risk of a fatal overdose within a few weeks of their release. That’s because drug users often withdraw and lose tolerance in jail, even after only a few days, Bray said. When released, if they go back to using, they may take the amount they were accustomed to before withdrawal and unintentionally overdose.
“If someone is booked on a Monday and released the following Sunday, their tolerance for opioids may have changed, and they most often do not know that,” Bray said.
Such medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, programs reduce the risk of death from any cause by 85%, according to a 2021 American Civil Liberties Union report, and they reduce the risk of a former inmate dying by overdose in the weeks after release by 75%.
The University of Utah’s Kem. C. Gardner Policy Institute lauded MAT programs in a 2020 report that found drug overdose was the leading cause of injury death in Utah. That report mentions Salt Lake County jail’s program and said more partnerships with law enforcement to get MAT programs in jails could help inmates.
‘I just feel such a responsibility’
(Conner family) The Conner family in January 2024, from left: Brenda, McKinsey, Mason and Ty, holding a photograph of Colin. Despite an order for early release to a drug treatment facility, Colin Conner didn’t make it.
Ty Conner has made it his mission to find out more about his son’s death. He’s called and emailed nearly everyone involved in the case, from the district attorney’s office and legal defenders, to the jail, Project Reality, Odyssey House and other treatment facilities that inmates are often ordered to enter.
Capt. Corey Kiddle, with the jail, told Ty Conner in early July, according to emails obtained by The Tribune in an open records request, “While the written order and case history do not explain this as clearly as it could have, the jail released Colin consistent with [his sentencing order] following standard protocol.”
Ty Conner said he hasn’t yet received many answers that satisfy him — and now he’s worried that what happened to his son could happen to others.
That’s why he scours Utah’s online court records to identify people who seem to have died under similar circumstances — those ordered released to treatment who ultimately ended up released to the street, including a man who died of an overdose within hours of release about two months after Conner’s death.
From Washington, Ty Conner has also taken to checking jail rosters across Utah every day, trying to find people he thinks are at risk of being released and dying.
These are people booked on allegations that indicate substance misuse issues, who have been in jail long enough to withdraw, who were ordered to be released to treatment and who, for whatever reason, were released to the streets or could be soon, because their sentence is about to expire.
He’s taken it upon himself to personally notify the involved judges, sending emails that are posted in each defendant’s case docket.
“I just feel such a responsibility,” Ty Conner said. “Yes, it’s my son, but we can’t let it happen to other families.”
His correspondences to judges each start the same way: “I write to you today with grave concern regarding the safety and wellbeing” of whoever it is this time.
And he always includes a statement of purpose in these emails, as a postscript.
“I am compelled to raise this concern because of the painful personal tragedy of my Son, Colin Yeager Conner, [who] lost his life in an accidental overdose shortly after a similar release from custody, with an explicit ORDER for direct transport to the Odyssey House.”
In at least one of those cases, Conner got a response — one that seemed to acknowledge, for the first time, that something had gone wrong.
“The judge can verify that [redacted] was held on this case and was released in a way that did not conform with the judge’s orders,” according to an email obtained by The Tribune.
A clerk said the judge would speak to the presiding judge, who “will address it with jail administration.”
A victory, Ty Conner feels. At last.
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