In short-staffed prison north of Charlotte, inmate is stabbed to death with a shank
An inmate at Alexander Correctional Institution was stabbed to death during a fight with another prisoner Wednesday night, authorities say.
The victim, 33-year-old Christopher Parker, was stabbed with a homemade weapon around 10 p.m. in a housing unit at Alexander Correctional, according to a news release from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
Authorities have identified a suspect but have not yet charged him, according to Alexander County Sheriff Chris Bowman, whose office is investigating the killing.
Like many state prisons, Alexander Correctional is short-staffed. About 16 percent of its officer positions are vacant, up from about 12 percent in January, according to DPS. Statewide, the officer vacancy rate is about 19 percent.
The sheriff told the Charlotte Observer the fight was captured on prison surveillance video. Both inmates were mopping the floor shortly before the attacker pulled a shank — a thin, sharpened piece of metal — from his pants and repeatedly stabbed Parker in the neck, chest and back, Bowman said.
“I would think (the attacker) had plans for it to happen,” Bowman said.
Bowman said a single prison officer was in the pod of about 40 inmates when the fight broke out on a second-floor walkway. The officer, who was on the first floor, responded to the scene but the fight over was by then. Parker ran downstairs and collapsed, Bowman said.
‘Nothing to lose’
Former prison officer Aaron Parson, who worked at Alexander Correctional in 2017, said the prison was so short-staffed that officers couldn’t thoroughly search the prison cells for weapons, drugs and other contraband.
“(The killing) doesn’t surprise me at all,” Parson said Thursday. “When you don’t have institutional control, you’re going to have incidents like this, and you have inmates with nothing to lose. They don’t care.”
The maximum-security housing unit where Parson once worked was chronically short-staffed, he said. The prison, located about 65 miles north of Charlotte, houses about 1,200 inmates and, as of September, it employed about 250 officers.
The housing unit where Parker was killed remained on lockdown as of Thursday morning, meaning that inmates’ movements are sharply restricted.
Short staffing isn’t the only threat to inmates and workers at the state’s prisons.
A 2017 Charlotte Observer investigation found that a hidden world of drugs, sex and gang violence thrives inside North Carolina’s prisons – and that officers who are paid to prevent such corruption are instead fueling it. Prison officers frequently collude with inmates on crimes that endanger staff members, inmates and the public.
Parker, the inmate killed Wednesday, was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly before midnight, DPS said. He was serving a 15-year prison sentence for kidnapping, armed robbery and other offenses.
He is the second inmate to be killed in the North Carolina prison system this year. On Sept. 28, 49-year-old Scott Whitmeyer died after being assaulted with a homemade weapon at Columbus Correctional Institution in Whiteville, west of Wilmington.
Last week, after a year and a half of studying problems at the prison system, the N.C. Prison Reform Advisory Board, submitted recommendations for improving staffing. Those include:
▪ Developing a comprehensive salary plan for staff
▪ Creating a recruitment and retention plan for each prison to keep workers
▪ Modifying the hiring process to bring new staff on quicker
The seven-member advisory board was created in 2018, following fatal attacks on five N.C. prison workers the year before.
Four of the deaths happened during a failed prison escape at Pasquotank Correctional in eastern North Carolina. Pasquotank had an officer vacancy rate of 40 percent in September, records show.
On Monday, one of the inmates charged in the Pasquotank attacks — 30-year-old Mikel Brady — was sentenced to death.
This story was originally published October 31, 2019 at 11:12 AM.
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