death last month of a 51-year-old inmate at the Western Correctional
Institution in Allegany County, as relatives reiterated their belief that foul
play led to his death.
Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and
Correctional Services, said the Maryland State Police and investigators with
the county state’s attorney’s office joined the department’s internal
detectives and the state medical examiner’s office in the investigation.
The department confirmed this month that corrections officers found Ifeanyi
A. Iko, a Nigerian immigrant, motionless in his cell at 4:30 p.m. April 30.
Paramedics were called to take him to Sacred Heart Hospital in Cumberland,
where he died at 5:10 p.m.
Iko had been kept apart from the general prison population for undisclosed
reasons, in a “special housing unit” where he was checked every 15 minutes by
a corrections officer or medical personnel, Vernarelli said.
A spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office in Baltimore said autopsy
results are pending.
Vernarelli said that disciplinary action has not been taken against any
inmates or officers in connection with the probe. He characterized the
participation of the state police and the county state’s attorney’s office as
a “matter of policy and procedure.”
“We always turn over everything when there is a death,” he said. He
declined to release additional details of the investigation.
Iko had been sent to prison in 1991 to serve a three-year sentence for drug
distribution in Prince George’s County, court records show. In 1992, he
stabbed and bit a correctional officer while at the Eastern Correctional
Institution and eventually received an additional 20-year sentence, court
records show.
Iko’s death shocked and outraged his family, Nigerian immigrants who live
mainly in Maryland and Northern Virginia, partly because they say they were
not notified by the prison. But prison officials say they made several
unsuccessful attempts to notify relatives. Iko’s relatives said they learned
of Iko’s death nearly two weeks after he died when a Sun reporter contacted
family members.
Benny O. Iko, a radiologist who practices in suburban Washington, said he
has little confidence that Maryland authorities will conduct a thorough
investigation. He said his brother complained in several letters to him about
abuse at the hands of prison guards.
“I have several letters that he has written in which he talked about being
beaten and attempts to suffocate him,” said Benny Iko. He said he is turning
those letters over to Bruce L. Marcus, an attorney for the family.
He said his first contact with Western Correctional Institution officials
about his brother’s death was in a letter dated Tuesday. “They said, `We’re
sorry about your brother’ and to come and collect his things,” Iko said.
Marcus, the family attorney, said he has received an outpouring of
information from inmates about Iko’s death.
“Based on the information that we were provided, there are a great many
questions which will have to be answered,” Marcus said. “The information that
we have received is suggestive of suspicious circumstances surrounding this
death.”
In seven letters postmarked from the prison, including six to The Sun and
one to an inmate’s family signed by 12 inmates, similar accounts were given of
Iko’s last day in the prison.
They claim that Iko was severely beaten, sprayed with Mace and tied up by
correctional officers, who took him from his cell in the segregation unit –
where prisoners are separated from the general prison population for
disciplinary, administrative or other reasons. The officers then moved him to
the “special housing” area of the prison, where he was eventually found
motionless.
The special housing area consists of 10 holding cells, a lab office and
other staff offices.
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The Sun provided prison officials with a summary of the inmates’ account.
Vernarelli, the prison spokesman, said in an e-mail response that “frequently
inmate allegations are found to be inaccurate and inflammatory.”
Iko was born and raised in Nigeria and, at 28, immigrated to the United
States in 1981. He lived with a brother and others in Hyattsville, worked
various service jobs and attended Southeastern University in Washington,
though he never graduated, relatives said.
While at Southeastern, he met Loreen Jones, whom he married. They had two
children but divorced in the late 1990s while Iko was still in prison, Jones
has said in a previous interview.
According to court records, Iko’s first brush with the law came in December
1982, when he was arrested for trying to pass a counterfeit $100 bill to pay
for some groceries at a Safeway store in Hyattsville. He received 18 months’
probation.
Since Iko’s incarceration on a drug charge, he had been transferred in and
out of several institutions around the state, including Eastern Correctional,
Patuxent Institution in Jessup, Maryland Correctional Institution in
Hagerstown and Western Correctional in Cresaptown.
His time in prison has been troubled. He received an added 20-year sentence
for stabbing a correctional officer at an Eastern Shore prison with a “shank”
or homemade knife – in self-defense, his family members say.
That corrections officer was later fired for his role in the abuse of
another inmate, according to court records.