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Prison officials and the Nevada Attorney General’s office are staying mum at least for a little while longer on the identity of and Ely Prison inmate suspected of murdering his cell mate Erick Houser earlier this month.
Houser was found dead in cell earlier this month.
According to White Pine county Under sheriff Scott Henroid results of the autopsy indicate that the inmate was murdered sometime during the night.
“The autopsy report shows strangulation was the cause of death,” Henroid said. “The Attorney General’s office whose duty it is to prosecute the case is being very cautious. We should be able to release information about the suspect later this week or early next.”
All that is known about the victim is that Houser was just a few months shy of serving his sentence and would have been a free man by the beginning of 2012.
Houser had been serving time for convictions in Washoe County on weapon and stolen vehicle possession charges.
Originally sentenced to the minimum security Carlin Honor Camp, Houser walked away while on a work detail in 2008 with less than a year before parole. He was captured less than a week later in Reno and now deemed a flight risk was sent to Ely Maximum Security Prison where he was ordered to serve out his full sentenced with another six years tacked on for his escape.
Last week White Pine County Sheriff’s office released the photo of Houser.
Statistics on inmate on inmate violence are notoriously hard to get from prison officials however the Ely State Prison when first planned and then built more than 20 years ago was designed specifically for inmates to be housed in individual cells not double bunking.
Former warden Tony Godinez who was the second chief executive at the prison cited double bunking as one of the major factors for inmate assaults in prison.
“There is no way anyone would want to have a cell mate,” Godinez said back in the early 1990’s. “First off you don’t know who you are going to get and frankly living with another guy in a tiny cell just breeds trouble. It is a hell of a lot easier and safer for staff to have single bunking and it is safer for the inmates too.”
But while the original plan may have been to give every prisoner his own cell an increasing inmate population combined with declining state budgets combined to see that double bunking became the norm and not the exception.
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