Ohio Inmates Say They’re Willing to End Siege, Call for Attorney

Prisoners occupying a building at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility said Monday they want to talk face-to-face with their attorney, but they are willing to end the bloody siege that began on Easter Sunday and has claimed at least eight lives. The 450 inmates are holding five guards captive.

Cleveland attorney Niki Schwartz, a prominent criminal defense attorney who has represented prisoners in several Ohio inmate rights cases, was flown to town in a state Highway Patrol plane on Sunday. Inmates had requested legal counsel, authorities said.

The prisoners draped a sheet with difficult to read block letters along the sand-colored walls of L Block, which appeared to reporters to spell out a message: “State Lying to Public. We are Willing to End. Must First Talk Face to Face With Our Att Nick Schwartz.” The last line was three capital letters: EME.

As the uprising entered its ninth day, the only hostage who has died, Robert Vallandingham, was memorialized in a service at a high school in nearby Minford.

Two others, Darrold Clark Jr. and James Anthony Demons, were freed last week in exchange for broadcasts made by prisoner representatives in which they listed their demands.

Demons said in an interview Monday that he and Vallandingham, both blindfolded and bound with duct tape, were sharing a cell last Wednesday when they heard a radio broadcast of a state prisons spokeswoman. She was discounting the import of a menacing message on one of the mutineers’ sheets.

The inmates were warning that if their demands weren’t met within 3 1/2 hours, a hostage would die. Spokeswoman Tessa Unwin called the statement “a standard threat” and the prisoners’ demands “petty and self-serving.”

Vallandingham “said the same thing I said,” Demons recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t believe she said that.’ ”

Shortly afterward--Demons said he wasn’t sure how much time had passed--prisoners told the pair of guards they would both soon be moved. But they only took Vallandingham away.

Vallandingham’s body was discovered last Tuesday. He died of strangulation, authorities said Monday. He had no other wounds and “no signs of physical abuse,” said Mike Lee, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. The Scioto County coroner’s office confirmed Lee’s statement.

Demons was constantly moved from cell to cell, he said, sometimes kept in the company of one other hostage, sometimes alone. Sometimes all of the captives were together.

He had to rely on hearing, smell and touch to decipher what was going on in Block L. The whispers from the prisoners were the worst. “I’m going to kill you, man,” they hissed at him. “I’m gonna stab you.”

He said he could tell from conversation around him that inmates were armed with handmade knives and shanks, and he thought they also had grenades. “Some of those guys were bomb specialists in the military,” he said.

They also had shovels, he said. The National Guard has moved three bulldozers to the ground and on Monday started using the backhoe to dig a trench at the western boundary of the prison. Corrections department spokesman Jim Mayers said the activity was an effort to detect tunnels inmates may be digging.

Authorities cut off electricity, running water and regular food shipments to L Block, but the prisoners have fashioned candles out of hair grease and tar paper, Demons said. He confirmed earlier reports that the prisoners have battery-powered radios and televisions.

Demons said that at least some of the hostages were injured, one with broken ribs and another apparently with a head wound.

The rebellion appears to be led by two factions that are unlikely allies: the Aryan Brotherhood white supremacy group and the black Muslims, Demons said.

“They don’t want any more killings,” he said. Then he added, “They will go down for what they believe in.”