Bad cellmates earn their reputation by acting inappropriately, neglecting their hygiene,  stealing and snoring. Ty Evans describes his bad cellmates and tells the story of cellmates who murder. 

I stood over my cellmate as he slept – I’m frustrated, angry, seething – twisting my sheet into a makeshift rope. There are offenses within a maximum security prison deserving of the death penalty, and Joshua D has committed one of them. After I paid off two debts for him, saving his crackhead ass from certain and severe beat-downs, or worse, he sneak-thiefed my locker and misappropriated another $50 in commissary items. In the free world, that’s petty theft. In my world, that’s a capital offense. Ask anybody.

So before I put my weight on his chest and pin his arms under the blanket, I’m considering how I can make this look like a suicide. The medical examiner will note the ligature marks circling his neck and declare it a homicide, unless I can make the marks rise up behind his ears, the way a deceased person looks after a hanging. I’ll have to lift his 140 pounds seven feet up on the bars and tie him off. That won’t be easy. And then my DNA will be all over the sheet used for the rope. I’d have an hour to do this, between night rounds by the officer on duty. It’ll be a tough crime to pull off, and I don’t need another 65 years added onto my 70.

He dozes unaware.

I think it over.

Low-life piece of shit. He certainly has it coming. But he’s not worth the punishment.

Bad cellmates. There are a lot of things one can do to irritate one’s cellmate, plenty to squabble about, and then there are the intolerable situations, things that provoke violence, if not outright demand it. Most of my cellmates have been pretty good, easy to get along with, and I make it a point to keep the lines of communication open, airing grievances before they build up into a blow-up. I’ve greeted numerous new cellmates with Rule Number One:

“You do what you want to do, and I do what I want to do.”

Followed by Rule Number Two:

“If you don’t like Rule Number One, move out!”

That broad covenant blends with, of course, the unwritten convict rule dictating that one should respect one’s cellmate at all times.

Bad cellmates I couldn’t live with stand out in my memory. Barry M was a serial farter, overloaded with raunch dressing and hot sauce every night. In a closed room, that noxious blast gets intolerable real fast. Add in the fact that he was on psych meds, and impervious to reason on any issue, and it added up to ‘He had to go.’ Mitchell C never owned a toothbrush in the eight months I knew him. His teeth were covered with a gray slime. Randy N would spend an hour on the toilet while I waited outside, then Fd go in and find pom toothpasted to the wall around the toilet. Repeat offender. At least that was better than Kody, who I’d roll over and find wide awake at 3am furiously thrashing the stiff one-eye. After a few failed bids at trolling for queers (“accidentally” letting his johnson flop out of his shorts), Kody moved out. His new cellie was definitely biting on the lure, as I later discovered. To each his own.

this, and said, “You ran a credit check on me before you had me moved in, didn’t ya?” Yeah, he lived on state pay, and expected to be cut in on every meal I made.

Then there are the conversational problems. At one end are the guys who never shut up and simultaneously never have anything interesting to say. At the other end are the silent types, and you can’t tell if they’re brooding over something or if their psych meds are working particularly well. Jason D was the latter type – he could go a solid week without uttering a single word. Not even a grunt. Big stacks of medication. Was in for shooting his 10-year-old son, then shooting himself. Very regretful, as you might imagine. Huge guy. But very nice and very docile, thankfully. We shared a cell for three full years.

+++

Others have not been as lucky as I have with bad cellmates.

Violence within a cell usually involves one of these two: a mentally ill paranoid violent type, or a child molester. Mix the two, and you’re asking for murder.

When I was at Pendleton, in 2007, Clay Howard got assigned to a room with Kent McDonald, a child molester who preyed on little boys. Clay was a probate for the Aryan Brotherhood. No AB can live with a chomo, that’s part of their creed. So Kent didn’t make it through breakfast the next day. At noon they found him bloody and stiff, with a pillow case tied around his head. After that, the facility made sure chomos only celled with other chomos.

The “mix” was perfect in Joliet in 1981, when two cells down from me, Gary D barely survived a brutal attack from Frank M. We found Gary clinging to life in the morning, face purple from petechiae. He’d been strangled and raped. Frank, profoundly weird with no social skills, was sent off to the Chester nuthouse near Menard. Gary, who was doing time for rape, later became the first person in Illinois exonerated by DNA on a rape case.

An argument about the lights being on was the spark that set off Cleveland White Feather against Robert Running Bear in USP Marion in 2009. Two Native Americans housed together, you’d think they would get along, but no. White Feather had done 30 years of a life sentence, while Running Bear was a fresh fish with 24 months for a sex offense. White Feather was up, writing a letter; Running Bear wanted the lights off. A fight ensued, and the smaller and older White Feather possessed the better grappling skills. Running Bear got choked out repeatedly, and White Feather then……. well, we’ll let his own words tell the story:

.. .he dragged Running Bear out from under the bed and said, “I’m sorry, you wanted to kill me? Now I’m going to kill you.”

White Feadier then gutted his victim with the razor blade, slicing Running Bear’s abdomen with “a sawing motion” for approximately four minutes. When the opening in Running Bear’s abdomen was large enough, he reached his hand inside and attempted to pull out Running Bear’s heart “to make sure that he could never get back up.” As he told the jury: “I just stuck my hand inside and reached as far as I could and grabbed whatever I could just feel and pull.” When he could not find the heart, he eventually settled on Running Bear’s liver. When he was done, he placed Running Bear on his bed and covered him with a blanket.

-United States v White Feather, 768 F.3d 735 (7th Cir. 2014).

White Feather’s only real punishment was some uncomfortable time in the hole. What else can you do to a lifer?

+++

A life sentence, either LWOP or an unservable term of years, opens up the prospect of more killing while in prison.

When Lieutenant Eugene Lasco was killed here at Indiana State Prison in 2021, it was a prisoner with over 200 years for three murders who stabbed him to death. No death penalty resulted – he pled out to a life sentence. But the COs now make sure he gets shit sandwiches in the SHU. A year after Lasco’s murder, a civilian welding supervisor got his head caved in by a chomo with a 240-year sentence. A long sentence simply means the State’s punishment options are limited, and deterrents are few.

Zachariah Melcher came into the Indiana system as a lifer for killing his wife and son, and, because he “can’t get right,” he’s proven to be hard to cell with. He got into a beef with his cellmate at Wabash Valley in 2008 and killed him, pleading guilty and taking a meaningless 65- year sentence running consecutive to his LWOP. After some lengthy seg time, they eventually moved him up here to ISP. All went well until he was erroneously moved into the honor dorm – I-Cellhouse – which is a two-man room situation.

Zach could clearly tolerate no other human. So the dorm counselor, problem-solver that she is, asked 35-year-old Marcus Bramlett to do her a favor and move out of his single cell and reside with poor, misunderstood Zachariah. Marcus agreed. Whether Marcus knew that Zach had killed his last cellmate or not, we don’t know – but I’ll bet anything he wouldn’t have moved in had he known. Who would accept an assignment like that?

Zach and Marcus were having problems, this we’d known for a couple weeks. They’d asked to be split up, but the counselor refused. Then at around 1:15am on February 26, 2025, the guys near cell 1-415 heard a struggle. The words were muted and weak, indicative of a strangling. It was Marcus, earnestly pleading, “Please don’t kill me. …Please. …Don’t kill me.”

Then it went silent.

I was two cells away and one row down, and heard nothing.

The officer making rounds at 1:30am noticed there was a problem in 415 and called a signal on his radio. The med team rushed in. Numerous more officers came to look. Marcus was carried out, apparently dead. Melcher was led out in handcuffs. He’d be heard to exclaim, “I told ya I can’t live with a drug addict!” The unit went on a lockdown.

The initial rumor was that Marcus died from an overdose. But Zach repeatedly confessed – he confesses to all of his murders – and the truth was revealed. Marcus Bramlett, a well-liked person here, had been murdered by the nutjob, Zachariah Melcher.

I did the calculus and figured I had too much going for me to kill Joshua D. The day after I contemplated Joshua’s “suicide,” I told him he had to move out. He instantly agreed to do so. No lip at all. “First thing Monday morning, go to the counselor’s office.” He had no problem with that.

Monday morning, Joshua was sleeping in. I picked up his bed, dropped it, roared at him to get his ass up and into the office. He did so. An hour later he was moved to C-Cellhouse.

Who knows how close he had come.

Ty Evans #158293 (I-311-B)

Indiana State Prison

One Park Row

Michigan City, IN

46360

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