Larry Nassar,
the former Olympics team doctor and convicted child molester, has been moved to Coleman federal prison in Sumter County.
The federal prison in Sumter County — the nation’s largest — has another high-profile prisoner: former Olympics team doctor and convicted serial child molester Larry Nassar.
Nassar was convicted last year of molesting dozens of girls and young women under his care when he served as the USA Gymnastics national team doctor and as a physician at Michigan State University. One of his victims, U.S. national team competitor Mattie Larson, earlier this year called him “the scariest monster of all.”
Nassar’s arrival at the Federal Correctional Complex-Coleman was news to Coleman City Council member Charles Felton. He noted that the prison is in unincorporated Sumter County about six miles away from the community of about 850 and simply has a Coleman address. While the prison is what most people know about Coleman, Felton said the prison isn’t a big topic in town.
“It ain’t much of a conversation,” he said Thursday. “We hear it on the news and someone will talk about it a few days and it’s over with.”
Serving a 60-year federal sentence for child pornography, Nassar was recently moved to the Coleman prison, according to news accounts. The sprawling campus of facilities is set back largely out of view off County Road 470 near the Lake County line, about 50 miles northwest of downtown Orlando.
Other noteworthy Coleman prisoners include Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger, who is serving a life term; former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, a Jacksonville Democrat who served in Congress for 24 years and in January started a five-year sentence for fraud and other crimes; and Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist serving life for the killings of two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
Nassar, 55, is in the same high-security facility as the 89year-old Bulger, while Peltier, 73, is in a second high-security prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. Brown, 71, spends her days in a minimumsecurity prison camp on the site.
They are among the 6,566 prisoners incarcerated at Coleman — more than any other federal penitentiary.
Nassar was relocated to Coleman from the Oklahoma Federal Transfer Center, a holdover facility. He’d been moved there from the federal penitentiary in Tucson, Ariz., where he was atatcked in late May after being released into the general population, according to news reports.
Retired Bureau of Prisons employee Ralph Miller, who specialized in sex-offender designations, said it was unlikely Nassar would be safe at the Tucson prison, which houses a high number of sex offenders, the Detroit News reported.
Nassar likely will spend the rest of his life behind bars. After his 60-year federal sentence ends, he would begin serving a 40- to 175-year sentence in state prison in Michigan for the sexual assaults. As he settles into his new prison, news comes that the Justice Department’s inspector general is looking into how the FBI handled sexual abuse allegations against him, the Chicago Tribune reported.
While Coleman gains recognition for the prison that bears its name, Felton said his small town has a quality known to its residents.
“It’s a nice little neighborhood,” he said. “It’s a quiet town — everyone knows one another.”