Inmate charged in Saturday jail death also charged in recent attack on different inmate

The Clark County Detention Center inmate charged in connection with the fatal beating and strangulation of his cellmate Saturday also tried to strangle an inmate in September, records obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal show.

Franklin Sharp, 33, was linked to the fatal attack on Jeremy Bowling, 25, because he and Bowling were locked in a cell together at the time. The two had been sharing the cell for about a week, according to an arrest report.

The attack happened sometime between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Saturday, because nothing appeared wrong at 5 p.m., when a guard did a routine walk-through past the pair’s cell, according to Richard Suey, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police Department’s detention services division.

During another walk-through at 5:30 p.m., a guard noticed Sharp was the only inmate visible through the cell door’s small window.

The guard asked Sharp, who was washing his hands, to step back, then entered the cell.

Near the foot of the door, the guard found Bowling lying in a pool of blood.

“He would not let me look out the window,” Sharp told the guard, according to the report.

Bowling was taken to University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead about 15 minutes later.

There was no camera in the cell, but the arrest report details evidence of a violent beating. Blood spatter patterns suggested Bowling’s head had been repeatedly slammed into a pool of his own blood.

Sharp had a few minor hand injuries and dried blood spatter on his legs.

About a month earlier, a guard caught Sharp trying to strangle another inmate, Joseph Barrese, with a piece of bedsheet, according to another report. The guard could hear Sharp saying, “Die (expletive),” while squeezing the cloth around Barrese’s neck.

A jail camera recorded the incident, which happened in an open dorm portion of the jail, where there are no cells but common areas for sleeping and eating.

Barrese, who was jailed on a car theft charge, told guards he did not know why Sharp attacked him. Sharp was charged with battery by prisoner and battery by strangulation while still in custody.

After that incident, Sharp was moved to disciplinary custody for 27 days, Suey said. That means Sharp spent 23 hours each day confined to his cell, without access to visitors or commissary, with a one-hour period allowed for showering, cleaning and phone calls.

Suey could not confirm whether or not Sharp had a roommate while in disciplinary custody, because rooms vary between one bunk and two. But he said it was highly likely that Sharp had a roommate for at least some of his time in disciplinary custody because of jail crowding.

Suey added that Sharp was a “career criminal” who had spent time in the detention center on at least 26 different occasions. But Suey said jail housing is not necessarily based on severity or history of charges, but on behavior. And Suey said that before the strangulation incident, Sharp had no previous behavioral problems while in custody.

With that in mind, Suey said Sharp was released back into general custody Oct. 1, when he was placed in Bowling’s cell.

“A lot of people, they’re like, ‘When an inmate attacks another inmate, they need to be restricted, they need to be by themselves,’” Suey said. “Those rooms don’t exist.”

Suey clarified that the county jail does have maximum security cells but said they are almost always full.

“We’re dealing with 4,300 of the worst of the worst. They do act up, they do attack each other,” Suey said. “I could play 20/20 hindsight all day long. It would be nice to say I’d restrict everybody, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about fights, but that’s not the reality.”

Bowling had no local criminal history aside from the car theft charge that landed him in jail, so he was initially placed in an open dorm setting Aug. 6, when he was booked. About a month later, Bowling was placed on suicide watch after he told jail officials he wanted to harm himself, Suey said.

Bowling was released from suicide watch and returned to an open dorm Sept. 13, but began acting out, Suey said, not complying with guards on at least one occasion. Bowling’s lawyer, Christopher Howell, said he wasn’t aware of any disciplinary issues regarding his client.

On Sept. 26, Bowling was taken out of open-dorm housing and placed in a two-bunk cell, where he remained five days later, when Sharp was placed in the same cell.

“None of the officers reported that there was any conflict between them,” Suey said, citing a continuing investigation.

Sharp had been in jail since June, when he was arrested in connection with an attempted robbery. During the incident, a man was robbed while waiting at a bus stop. The robber threw the man’s cellphone on the ground, pulled out a knife and told the man to “beg for his life,” according to Sharp’s arrest report.

The victim was not stabbed during the incident but was “extremely shaken up,” according to the report.

Sharp did not admit to the robbery but told police he had been transient since being released from prison in 2011, the report reads, which the Nevada Department of Corrections confirmed. He was charged in June with attempted robbery with a deadly weapon, assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon.

Since the Saturday homicide, Sharp was placed in maximum-security custody. His felony arraignment for the case is scheduled Wednesday morning.

“It’s a horrible situation,” Suey said. “We get 70,000 people a year, and you have a responsibility to protect all of them, and when that doesn’t happen, it’s not a good feeling.”

Bowling was from Shelbyville, Kentucky, according to the Clark County coroner’s office. His mother, Patricia Fitzpatrick, set up a GoFundMe to help bring Bowling’s body home, which had raised $620 as of Tuesday night.

Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Follow @rachelacrosby on Twitter.