Questions surround inmate’s death in Clark County jail

The lawyer for a man accused of beating and stabbing his cellmate to death Friday at the county jail questioned why authorities didn't segregate his mentally ill client.

Deputy public defender Norm Reed said 18-year-old Carl Marcus Guilford "has serious mental health issues" and should have been kept away from other inmates at the Clark County Detention Center.

In the wake of the slaying, Las Vegas police were reviewing the procedures that allowed them to house Guilford with 29-year-old Francesco Sanfilippo, who was facing 13 counts of possessing child pornography and had a pending drunken driving case.

The decision to house the men together was determined by the jail's classification system, an objective formula that considers an inmate's crime, age, criminal history, medical needs, sexual orientation and other factors to determine the safest housing arrangement. Most big-city jails use such formulas, which are considered successful, experts say.

The formula determined both men would be at risk if placed with the general population, so they were put together in a cell, jail Capt. Michael See said.

Officials were reviewing the case "to see if there's anything we could have done differently or better," including looking at the classification system, he said.

VOICE OF THE DEVIL

A jail guard discovered the attack during a routine bed check about 1:20 a.m. Friday. Sanfilippo had suffered an apparent head wound, and investigators soon learned Guilford had beaten and stabbed Sanfilippo with a pencil after an altercation, police said.

Reed said he was surprised Guilford had a cellmate because police knew he had mental competency issues.

Jail officials were aware Guilford was scheduled for a competency hearing Tuesday in his murder case. He is charged with suffocating his 6-year-old cousin with a comforter in May.

The hearing, Reed said, probably would have determined Guilford should be sent to Lakes Crossing, the state's mental health facility.

Reed said he would look into whether Guilford was properly medicated for his mental illness at the jail.

Guilford held a comforter over the mouth of his cousin to quiet him so he wouldn't wake the boy's mother at their Desert Inn Road apartment, according to his arrest report.

The boy, who had severe asthma, stopped breathing.

Guilford told police he heard the devil's voice tell him "well done" as he left the room, the report said.

The teen's mother told investigators her son was bipolar and talked openly with family members about angels, demons and "making sacrifices."

Sanfilippo was jailed after Henderson police found 19 child pornography videos on his computer during an investigation into photos he sent a 15-year-old girl.

The investigation had begun months earlier when the father of the Hawaiian girl contacted police after Sanfilippo sent lewd images of himself to her over the Internet, according to an arrest warrant.

Sanfilippo first contacted the girl after finding a video of her dancing on YouTube.

NO PERFECT SYSTEM

One expert questioned why the two inmates shared a cell.

Richard Lichten, an expert on jails and prisons, said suspects charged with crimes against children are often the most at-risk and should be housed together, away from the general population. Although Guilford and Sanfilippo each fit that category, Lichten said he would not house a murder suspect with a child pornography suspect.

"In my experience, speaking in generalities, I would not house those two people together," he said.

See said the preliminary investigation found no reason why the men should have been housed separately.

Ideally, every inmate would be separated, he said.

See did not address overcrowding at the jail in downtown Las Vegas, but it has been an issue for years, if not decades.

Many of its roughly 3,400 inmates are still housed in large rooms on cots, while a low-level offender jail in the northeast valley sits empty because county officials won't fund it to save money during the recession.

Friday's killing was the first inmate-on-inmate slaying at the county jail since 1979, when Patrick McKenna strangled his cellmate. McKenna is on death row for that murder.

The classification system used to sort and house inmates has been employed in jails throughout the past few decades as courts required better and safer conditions for inmates, said Jeff Eiser, a retired jail administrator in Cincinnati.

Now jails use a complicated system to separate people. Jails would not keep drunks in the same room as violent crime suspects. A police officer or celebrity would not be housed in the general population, where the risk of being hurt can be greater than for an average person. A diabetic needing special care might require special housing.

Eiser said he was unfamiliar with the inmate death or the policies at the Clark County jail, although he helped train some of the jail's staff on verbal communication several years ago and found the facility "very well-staffed, very well-run, very clean."

The jail staff who interview inmates for the classification system might not have had access to Guilford's criminal record before he turned 18 -- an important component of the formula.

Contact reporters Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039 or Lawrence Mower at lmower@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0440.