Tornado Alley (PROG)

[newmedman]

DEATHS WHILE ON OBSERVATION

But sometimes a determined person will still stymie law enforcement and die even while on a suicide watch.


? Former NFL New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez hung himself in his Boston prison cell in 2017 while serving a life sentence for the first degree murder shooting death of his former friend Odin Lloyd in 2013, The Associated Press reported.

Hernandez used a bedsheet tied to his window, prison officials told CNN.

? Arcan Cetin, 20, charged with killing five people in a Washington state mall in 2016, hung himself in his cell at the Snohomish County Jail in 2017, CNN reported.

? Robert Seman, a triple-murder suspect accused of molesting and killing a 10-year-old girl and then killing her grandparents in an arson fire, jumped to his death from the fourth floor of an Ohio courthouse while in custody, in what police called an apparent suicide in 2017.

? Stuart Alexander, known as the “Sausage King” and in a maximum surveillance hospital cell at San Quentin State Prison, was found unresponsive in December 2005, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Alexander, 44, was in prison for killing three meat inspectors in a Bay Area meat processing plant in 2000.

He was in a secure room with just a mattress and 24-hour video surveillance and prison guards who checked in on him every 15 minutes. Prison officials were at a loss to explain how the Sausage King died in its “highest level observation” room, the LA Times wrote.

Turns out Alexander had put on 80 pounds while in custody, had health issues, and it was later determined he died of a pulmonary embolism.


? Ariel Castro, convicted in the kidnapping and raping of three girls he held prisoner at his Cleveland home for a decade — impregnating one of them — killed himself by hanging in his Ohio prison cell in 2013, WBNS 10TV reported. He was isolated from other prisoners “for his own protection,” officials said at the time.

There is a long history of inmates dying by suicide in prison — in the U.S. and abroad — when they were supposed to be watched.

For example, as far back as April 1945, Nazi war criminal Hermann Wilhelm Göring killed himself the night before he was to be hanged by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule in his cell in Nuremberg, according to biographers.

“Suicide is often the single most common cause of death in correctional settings,” the World Health Organization found in its Preventing Suicide in Jails and Prison report in 2007.



Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article233743337.html#storylink=cpy