Jury deadlocks, mistrial declared in former Richland County jail guard's trial over Alex Rios's 2019 death

This week, Mansfield’s seven-year wait for an answer to Alex Rios’s death got no shorter. The jurors in the trial of former jail guard Mark Cooper deadlocked after three days of deliberations, and a judge declared a mistrial.

Alexander "Alex" Jose Rios was 28 on Sept. 19, 2019, when jail officers restrained him inside the Richland County jail. He became unresponsive during the incident and never regained consciousness. He was removed from life support and died in a Mansfield hospital.

Surveillance video from that day told a harder story. It showed officers striking and kicking Rios and using Tasers on him. It showed Cooper standing with his full weight on Rios’s back near his neck while Rios was restrained.

Richland County Coroner Daniel Burwell initially ruled the cause of death "excited delirium" and the manner "accidental." Medical experts retained by the family concluded it was a homicide caused by oxygen deprivation during the prone restraint — mechanical asphyxia — and the family contested the coroner’s ruling.

Seven years have passed since that hospital death — seven years of waiting on rulings, waiting on the video, waiting through a trial, and now waiting to learn whether there will be another.

The trial

Cooper, a former Richland County Jail guard, stood trial in Richland County Common Pleas Court on one count of reckless homicide and two counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with Rios’s 2019 death.

A 12-person jury deliberated for three days before reporting it was hopelessly deadlocked. The panel reached neither a conviction nor an acquittal.

Judge Brent Robinson, who presided over the trial, declared the mistrial. Medina County Prosecutor S. Forrest Thompson served as the special prosecutor.

A mistrial means a trial ends without a verdict. There is no conviction and no acquittal, and a hung jury is the classic ground for declaring one. After a mistrial, prosecutors may generally retry the case before a new jury.

What comes next

The decision that matters now is whether they will. In the days after the mistrial, Richland County prosecutors had not said whether they would retry Cooper.

The county has closed one chapter already: Richland County agreed to a $4 million settlement with Rios’s family on Dec. 9, 2021, before the family ever filed a lawsuit. The criminal case remains the one still open.

A retrial would put Rios’s death before a new jury for another chance at an answer. If the county declines, the case goes quiet — and this mistrial becomes the place where accountability stopped.