The Associated Press reports that A North Carolina prison was placed on lockdown recently after an inmate was killed in an attack led by other inmates.
The incident took place on Friday morning at the Central Prison located on 1300 Western Blvd., which is near downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.
What happened?
At around 9:30 a.m. on Friday, a 35-year-old inmate named Ronald S. Rhodes was assaulted by other inmates in the recreation yard of the prison.
Specifics about the attack are hard to come by. It has only been reported, by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, that the attack was led by “several other offenders” and that some kind of weapon was used.
Central Prison’s first responders and local paramedics responded to the attack. They performed first aid on Rhodes in an attempt to resuscitate him.
The injuries that Rhodes suffered, however, were too severe to be overcome, and he ended up dying about one hour after the attack.
Authorities have put Central Prison on lockdown to investigate the incident.
What we know:
So far, we do not know a whole lot about the situation. We don’t know why exactly the other inmates decided to attack Rhodes, and we don’t know exactly what kind of injuries Rhodes received. But, we do know some things about Rhodes, himself.
Reports indicate that Rhodes, at the request of Wake County, was being held at Central Prison as a “safe keeper.”
The News & Observer reports that this means that Rhodes “was being held temporarily in a state prison facility pre-trial.” The outlet explains:
County jails request that state prisons take in safekeepers for reasons including treatment for mental or physical health, to avoid housing co-defendants together or if the individual’s safety has been threatened.
What we also know is Rhodes’s criminal history. It’s a long history that spans from 2004 to 2015, and it includes such things as felony kidnapping, felony extortion, possession of a firearm by a felon sentenced to prison, and more. Rhodes has also been on the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry since 2004, after being convicted, at the age of 16, of kidnapping a 12-year-old.
Still, it is unknown why Rhodes was attacked. The investigation into the matter continues.