By Mark Pesto
The Tribune-Democrat, Johnstown, Pa.
SOMERSET, Pa. — A white supremacist who police say tried to kill an SCI-Somerset guard for being too friendly to black inmates was arraigned Tuesday morning by a Somerset County district judge.
In his first court appearance since charges were filed in the alleged attack, William Amos Cramer, 26, who appeared by video from SCI-Forest in Marienville, Forest County, told District Judge Ken Johnson, of Somerset, that he does not plan to request a public defender.
He hasn’t yet decided whether he will hire a private attorney or attempt to defend himself in court, he added.
Johnson scheduled Cramer’s preliminary hearing for 11:10 a.m. Tuesday, court documents indicate.
Cramer, a Fayette County native, was receiving medical treatment at Somerset Hospital on Dec. 3 when he pulled out a razor blade and lunged at a guard, according to a Jan. 17 press release issued by Chief Randy Cox, of the Somerset Borough Police Department.
“Cramer’s stated intention was to slit the throat of the officer,” Cox wrote in the press release.
“According to Cramer, he had accessed the razor blade inside SCI-Somerset, swallowed it and then passed it in a bathroom at the hospital.
“He was able to conceal it on his person until his attack on the officer.”
Cox added: “Apparently Cramer, a self-avowed white supremacist, viewed the victim officer as being friendly with African-American inmates at SCI-Somerset and found this offensive.”
The guard dodged the attack and was not injured, according to Cox.
Cramer had previously seriously injured two other guards in racially motivated attacks.
He used a razor-like weapon to slit the throat of a Hispanic guard at SCI-Coal Township in August of 2014.
In that case, he claimed that he was preemptively defending himself from racial prejudice by non-white inmates and guards, according to a contemporary report in The Daily Item, of Sunbury.
And while imprisoned at SCI-Mahanoy in November of 2015, Cramer feigned heart trouble in order to get guards to open his cell, then lunged at a guard and slashed him repeatedly with a makeshift shank, according to The Daily Item. He told an investigator that he wanted to kill the guard because he was too friendly to black inmates.
The SCI-Mahanoy attack happened less than 48 hours after Cramer was found guilty of attempted homicide in the SCI-Coal Township attack.
Cramer told an investigator “that he had no remorse for the incident and would continue to attack correctional officers because he had nothing else to lose,” police wrote in a report, according to The Daily Item.
“The defendant related (that) he is already serving life sentences and (that) there is nothing more anyone else can take from him.”
Cramer has been serving a life sentence since November 2013 for strangling William Sherry, his cellmate at Cambria County Prison.
In a slur-filled note he wrote to another inmate after the murder, he stated that he killed Sherry because he believed that Sherry, a white man, had fathered a child with a black woman, according to a 2014 opinion by a Superior Court of Pennsylvania judge who denied Cramer’s appeal of his sentence.
©2018 The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.)