Prisoner Kills and Mutilates Cellmate, Heads To Chow Hall Wearing Body Parts As Necklace

An inmate at Columbia Correctional Institution’s annex was able to strangle and mutilate his cellmate, gouge out his eyeballs, wrap his blood-soaked body in a sheet and walk into the prison’s chow hall wearing the dead inmate’s ear strung around his neck before officers learned anything was amiss, several prison sources told the Miami Herald.

As reported by|MH The murder happened Thursday morning, hours before an apparently unrelated gang melee erupted in another building on the compound, located in Lake City, 50 miles west of Jacksonville. In that disturbance, two gangs — the Bloods and the Cutthroats — began stabbing each other with knives in a clash over smuggled contraband, a source said. Only one officer was in the control room — responsible for supervising scores of inmates at the time it happened in G Dorm of the main building, one of the sources said.

Thursday’s murder happened in the prison’s annex — a building separate from the main building where the armed battle took place later in the day, the source said. The annex and the main building are run as two distinct prisons, but they are part of the same compound, with a total capacity of about 3,000 inmates. Columbia houses some of the most violent inmates in the state, prison officials said.

A spokesman for the Department of Corrections identified the slain inmate as Larry Mark, 58. Mark was serving a life sentence for a murder he committed in Broward County in 1981, according to his prison record. When Mark was 20, he and a co-defendant hailed a cab, then crushed the driver’s skull by bludgeoning him repeatedly with a heavy object. The fruits of their crime: $35 and a wedding ring.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/special-reports/florida-prisons/article218386225.html