A former Inglewood teacher convicted last month of murdering one woman and kidnapping and sexually assaulting a second woman nearly two decades ago has died in custody while awaiting sentencing, police documents show.

Charles Wright, 59, died on Aug. 13, about a month before his scheduled Sept. 10 sentencing for the cold-case crimes, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.

Sheriff’s Lt. Steven De Jong said Wright had been in a medical unit since April for a medical condition that preceded his arrest. De Jong said jail staff attempted to render aid after finding Wright unresponsive, and that there is no evidence of foul play.

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 coroner’s website lists Wright’s cause of death as “deferred.”

The office of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

Gascón’s office said last month that it expected Wright to be sentenced to 50 years to life in state prison for his convictions of first-degree murder, kidnapping for oral sex and forced oral sex — crimes that Gascón called “particularly egregious” because they were committed “by someone in a position of trust and authority.”

Wright was a high school teacher in the Inglewood Unified School District when he was arrested in early 2022 after DNA and fingerprint evidence linked him to the 2005 murder of Pertina Epps, a 21-year-old who was found strangled in a Gardena carport, prosecutors said.

Cold case investigators resubmitted evidence from the unsolved murder in 2021 for modern forensic testing 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 bag because he was selling bags from his car. He did not elaborate on the DNA evidence.

“I didn’t do this,” he said.

Wright was subsequently charged with the kidnapping and sexual assault of an unknown 18-year-old woman in 2006. He was also convicted for that charge last month.

“Fortunately, the postponement of the trial was not a denial of justice,” Gascón said in a statement after the sentencing.