A former teacher in Inglewood was sentenced last month of murdering one woman and kidnapping and sexually assaulting another nearly two decades ago has died in custody awaiting sentencing, according to law enforcement records.
Charles Wright, 59, died Aug. 13, about a month before his scheduled Sept. 10 sentencing for the cold crimes, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Lt. Steven De Jong, of the sheriff’s department, said Wright had been housed in a medical unit since April due to a medical condition that preceded his arrest. De Jong said prison staff tried to render aid after finding Wright unresponsive, and that no foul play is suspected.
A list of in-custody deaths on the sheriff’s website does not give a cause of Wright’s death, saying it is pending a final autopsy report. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s website lists Wright’s cause of death as “deferred.”
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Gascón’s office said last month that it expected Wright to be sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for his convictions for first-degree murder, kidnapping for oral copulation and forced oral copulation — crimes that Gascón called “particularly serious” to have committed. “by someone who was in a position of trust and authority.”
Wright was a middle school teacher in the Inglewood Unified School District when he was arrested in early 2022 after DNA and fingerprint evidence linked him to the slaying of Pertina Epps, a 21-year-old who was found strangled in a Gardena carport in 2005, prosecutors said.
Cold-case investigators had submitted the evidence from the unsolved slaying for modern forensic tests in 2021 and arrested Wright, of Hawthorne, when it matched him, investigators said.
Wright told The Times in 2022 that he was innocent of the crime and that his fingerprints were only on the woman’s purse because he had sold purses from his car. He did not explain the DNA evidence.
“I didn’t do this,” he said.
Wright was subsequently charged with the 2006 kidnapping and sexual assault of an unidentified 18-year-old woman, for which he was also convicted last month.
“Thankfully, justice was not delayed,” Gascón said in a post-conviction statement.