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| Second killing prompts new officers at Angola |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 03/01/2004 |
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The Louisiana corrections department will send a team of veteran officers to the state prison at Angola to conduct a "shakedown" search of the area where two inmates have been killed within a month. The search for weapons and other contraband was ordered after an inmate was stabbed to death Thursday, said Richard Stalder, head of the state prison system. The team of officers is scheduled to arrive for the search today, Warden Burl Cain said. The state regularly sends teams of officers to conduct searches at prisons that have had spikes in violence, drug use or weapons possession, said Stalder, who was reappointed head of the prison system on Thursday. "When we have an incident, like we had at Angola yesterday evening, then we will target that institution," Stalder said in a telephone interview Friday. Both February killings at Angola happened at Camp D, an area with about 850 inmates. Thursday's killing happened inside a shower; a killing on Feb. 3 occurred in a large room where dozens of inmates sleep on cots, said Capt. Spence Dilworth, an investigator with the West Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office. In Thursday's killing, inmate Michael Kelly hid a sharpened piece of metal under a towel, then used it to stab his cellmate, Joseph Chase, several times when they were inside a locked shower, Dilworth said. At least one officer was a witness to the attack, Dilworth said. Kelly has confessed to the killing, telling investigators that he and Chase "hadn't been getting along for a while," Dilworth said. Chase's killing came less than a month after the Feb. 3 death of Michael Bradford, who was killed when fellow inmate Andre Leday allegedly hit him in the head with a pillowcase containing a chunk of concrete, Dilworth said. Leday has confessed to the killing, Dilworth said. District Attorney Sam D'Aquilla said that he would likely take Leday's case before a grand jury within a month. Angola, about 120 miles north of New Orleans, is the state's highest security prison, and most of its more than 3,200 inmates are serving life sentences. The average Angola inmate has a sentence of 88 years. |
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