Prison locked down after guard stabbed
The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville is on lockdown after a corrections officer was severely stabbed Tuesday, the Ohio Department of Correction and Rehabilitation reported Wednesday.
The officer, Matthew Mathias, was taken to a hospital in Huntington, West Virginia.
The attack occurred at 10:41 a.m. in the hospital infirmary, according to an incident report by the State Highway Patrol.
The report said two inmates attacked the officer with metal weapons. Mathias was flown by helicopter to the hospital.
Sally Meckling, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Civil Service Association, said it appears that one of the attackers is three-time killer Casey Pigge.
Pigge has killed two people while in the custody of the corrections department.
“It was multiple, multiple wounds,” Meckling said of Tuesday’s attack. “It’s very serious.”
Her union represents Ohio corrections officers.
Prisons agency spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said in an email that prison is on lockdown while the highway patrol investigates.
“Matt underwent surgery yesterday afternoon and is still in the Neuro/ Trauma Intensive Care Unit at St. Mary’s Medical Center, in Huntington, West Virginia. He is considered in stable condition,” Smith said
The highway patrol declined to release the names of the suspects before they’re charged.
Meckling said that she and colleagues would travel to the prison Thursday to talk to personnel and learn more about the incident. She said her union had already raised concerns about staffing at the prison, even picketing it in 2016.
Pigge, 30, was convicted in the 2008 murder in Chillicothe of his ex-girlfriend’s mother.
He also pleaded guilty to the February 2016 murder of a fellow inmate in the Lebanon Correctional Institution, Luther Wade. Pigge tricked Wade into putting on a blindfold and, using a cinder block he’d removed from the wall of their cell, beat Wade to death.
On Feb. 1, 2017, Pigge was on a prison bus on the way back to the Lucasville facility after pleading guilty to murdering Wade. He used his chains to strangle another inmate, David E. Johnson, 61. He pleaded guilty to that crime in July.