Five California prisoners worked in concert to kill a fellow inmate last week at Pelican Bay State Prison, authorities said.
Guards at the high-security prison near the Oregon border found Rene B. Lopez fatally injured in a housing unit at about 6 p.m. on Thursday, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials wrote in a statement. Lopez, 31, was pronounced dead at the prison clinic about an hour later.
Lopez was serving a 29-year term for committing an assault with a firearm in Los Angeles County, authorities said.
After reviewing surveillance footage, investigators concluded that two inmates, Joseph W. Morales and Richard Garcia, attacked Lopez with makeshift weapons. Both are convicted murderers, officials said.
Garcia, 52, has been serving a life sentence since 1997, when he was found guilty of murder and assault in San Luis Obispo County, according to officials.
Morales, 40, was convicted in 2019 of killing a man in Woodcrest, an unincorporated community south of Riverside. According to a state appellate court decision that summarized evidence at his trial, Morales was living in a large residential compound that included a home, an RV and several makeshift dwellings when he got in an argument with a fellow resident and lunged at him with a knife.
“He’s always got a knife in his hand,” another resident testified at Morales’ trial.
After residents demanded he leave on July 23, 2016, Morales stabbed one of them to death. While awaiting trial in a Riverside County jail, Morales stabbed another inmate so hard that the tip of the knife broke off in the victim’s body, according to the appellate decision. The man survived.
Prison officials said surveillance footage showed Morales and Garcia handed the weapons used to kill Lopez to another inmate, Estevan Saucedo, who tossed them in a garbage can. Authorities said two other prisoners, Jose D. Rodriguez and Freddie G. Sanchez, also were involved in the killing but didn’t specify how.
Saucedo, 30, is serving a life term for gunning down a man in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood near Huntington Park in 2016. Rodriguez, 28, was sentenced last year by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to 31 years for manslaughter and attempted murder. Sanchez, 35, is serving a life sentence for assault with a firearm, burglary and firing a gun at an occupied car.
A reputed member of Boyle Heights’ Krazy Ass Mexican gang, Sanchez and two others were breaking into a parked car when plainclothes detectives confronted them, according to a state appellate court decision. One of Sanchez’s associates shot at the policemen, who returned fire. No one was hit.
While imprisoned, Sanchez assaulted another inmate and was sentenced to another eight years, authorities reported.
Lopez’s killing is the 17th homicide in the California prison system this year, according to an official accounting, compared to 30 a year ago. Last year‘s surge in inmate killings and attacks on staff prompted prison officials to curtail privileges, restrict movement and increase searches for weapons and contraband at most facilities.
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