By Bryan Denson
The Oregonian
PORTLAND, Ore. — A federal prisoner accused of slashing the faces of two corrections officers with a razor inside the walls of the government’s medium-security prison in Sheridan has been indicted, according to records made public Thursday.
Sajoh C. Yates, a 36-year-old now in a highly secure federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri, was charged in Portland’s U.S. District Court with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon in the bloody Oct. 13 attack that disfigured two officers.
Yates had tussled with and bitten corrections staffers before, logged time on suicide watch and acknowledged that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, according to jail records, mental health evaluations and other records that Yates filed six years ago in a federal court in Ohio.
For reasons still unclear, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons moved Yates from the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Missouri to Sheridan, where he was housed in a newly created mental health unit.
That gave Yates the freedom to mingle with other inmates and staffers in a 110-man mental health unit known as 4-B. The October attack on a lieutenant and a senior corrections officer occurred in the unit.
“The lieutenant is very lucky to be alive ... the corridor officer is very lucky to have his eye,” said Michael Meserve, a union official who represents about 360 line staff at the federal prison complex, which also has a detention center and minimum-security work camp. “It was a wakeup call, really, for the administration and the union.”
The razor attack raised questions about staffing, security and overcrowding in the prison, which sits about 50 miles southwest of Portland. The institution held 1,134 inmates – 47.5 percent higher than its rated capacity -- in an official count last August, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Meserve, a regional vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees and its Council of Prison Locals, pieced together an account of the attack and its aftermath by interviewing union members in Oregon, Washington and the federal medical center in Missouri.
Here is that account:
All night long, Yates banged around and hurled things inside his cell in 4-B. He ranted that a female corrections officer – not in the unit at the time – had killed his pet squirrel, a fiction invented by a troubled mind.
Correctional officers conducted inmate counts at 12:20 and 5 a.m. Between those counts, the inmate trashed his quarters. Later that morning, Yates was allowed out of his cell into a common area called The Flats with other prisoners.
About 7 a.m., a lieutenant identified in the indictment under the initials “S.S.L.,” and a senior officer specialist identified as “T.O.Y.,” walked to the doorway of the Yates’ cell with a camera to document the damage.
The officers were just getting under way when an inmate authorities have identified as Yates rushed up behind them in a rage, clutching a razor between his thumb and forefinger.
The razor had been pried from a prison-issue disposable shaver.
What happened next was a blur.
The lieutenant was sliced deeply across his cheek from below his mouth nearly to his ear. Then came another slice, a downward thrust that split part of his ear and struck his neck.
That swipe came within a fraction of an inch of striking the lieutenant’s carotid artery. Had the artery been severed, the lieutenant could have bled to death within minutes without professional medical care, according to a former trauma doctor.
The prisoner then slashed at the officer. A downward slice cut him above and below his eye. Another cut him from the corner of an eye toward his ear.
“He’s very lucky,” Meserve said. “That razor came very close to his eye twice.”
The officers were grappling with the attacker when another corrections officer dashed in to help, calling for backup on his radio. He was a tall man, nearly 300 pounds, and helped the wounded officers subdue and then cuff the prisoner.
“It’s my understanding,” Meserve said, “that the inmate was not injured in any way.”
The corrections officers were taken to a hospital, where they underwent hours of reconstructive surgery.
Officers put Yates in solitary confinement at Sheridan and later moved him to the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Washington. There, according to Meserve, he refused to take his medications, follow orders, or wear restraints, forcing officers to suit up in tactical gear to move him to a new cell.
Prison officials sent him back to the federal medical center in Springfield, where, according to Meserve’s inquiry, he was returned to the highest security level for mentally ill inmates: “Care Level 4.”
Sheridan Warden Marion Feather ordered a lockdown after the razor attack and canceled visiting privileges for all inmates. She and union officials wanted to chart ways to safeguard staffers assigned to the mental health program.
On Feather’s two-year watch as warden, Sheridan has earned a reputation as a clean, habitable, relatively violence-free place for prisoners whose average sentence runs about 10 years.
But in a five-week stretch this fall, portions of the complex were put in lockdown at least three times, including the razor slashing and a Nov. 4 fatal beating in which one inmate pummeled another with a mop handle and his boots.
Feather instituted two immediate changes, according to Meserve. She added another officer to the unit during daylight hours when prisoners are allowed out of their cells. Feather also terminated early-morning wakeups for food service to minimize the number of prisoners congregating in common areas when staffing is light.
Meserve said prison staffers also looked for ways to prevent inmates from making weapons out of disposable razors. As it stands, he said, corrections staffers don’t track inmates’ shaving implements unless they are in solitary confinement.
Many corrections officials thought the incident could have been stopped sooner had more officers been posted to 4-B at the time and been allowed to carry pepper spray, Meserve said.
Union officials – so far, to no avail – have pushed for a waiver to allow officers to carry small canisters of pepper spray in the unit, he said. State correctional officers in Oregon and Washington carry such canisters, but the Bureau of Prisons makes only a few exceptions to its ban.
In March 2011, the National Institute of Corrections issued a report on the murder of Jayme biendl, a Washington Department of Corrections office who was strangled by an inmate in the chapel of the Washington State Reformatory.
A key recommendation by the institute was that the reformatory’s corrections staff should carry pepper spray. Meserve considers that finding – balanced against the federal prison system’s ban on the irritant – hypocritical.
The National Institute of Corrections, as it happens, is a division of the Bureau of Prisons.