COLOMBIA (AP) – Nearly 30 inmates were charged with connection to a riot in a South Carolina prison in 2018 that left seven inmates dead and 22 wounded, the state attorney general announced on Thursday.
The charges were brought against 29 inmates at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, Attorney General Alan Wilson said during a news conference. Three were charged with murder. Another eighteen were charged with first-degree assault and assault by a mob, resulting in death.
One of the prisoners accused of assault and assault by a mafia is Michael Juan Smith. He is known for a shot that paralyzed a student at the University of South Carolina in 2013.
The correctional facility, which is located about 56 miles (90 kilometers) east of Columbia, is a high-security prison that is home to violent criminals and inmates with behavioral problems.
Prosecutors said violence broke out between rival gangs after an inmate, Michael Milledge, was killed. Prison gang members then retaliated against the inmate who killed him, the Post and Courier reported. The use of illegal cell phones to communicate led to the “mob riot,” Wilson said.
“The reason we are here today is because of these cell phones,” said Corrections Department director Bryan Stirling on Thursday. Telephones are “essentially a weapon in the hands of prisoners,” he said.
A state audit found several failures by prison officials in handling violence that night. Stirling said last year that it has implemented security measures to detect cell phones brought in by visitors or prisoners.
The nearly eight hours of prison killings and chaos in April 2018 were the country’s most deadly prison riots in nearly 25 years. All of Lee’s 1,200 prisoners were put in confinement for weeks after it happened.
Third Circuit attorney Ernest Finney III called the chaos investigation “too complicated”. He said prisoners destroyed the prison’s video recording system so there was no evidence.
Some prisoners were reluctant to share what they saw, fearing retaliation, and others refused to cooperate or destroyed the evidence, officials said. The charges issued by the state grand jury were “professionally made and took too long,” said Finney.
Authorities have indicated that more charges could come.
The violence in prison did not go away. An inmate was killed there two weeks ago and a policeman was stabbed earlier this year.