Four were participants in the Lucasville prison riot in 1993, including Jason Robb of Dayton. Dean twice assaulted corrections officers, LoParo said.
“He had assaulted a guard at the prison (by) making a shank out of a toothbrush. I know he had another assault on a guard where he took a razor blade out of a razor and cut a guard (and) bit a guard’s face,” said Andy Wilson, Clark County prosecutor.
The six will remain at Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, where some of the state’s death row inmates have been housed since 2005, LoParo said.
The move will consolidate death row, currently spread between the Youngstown facility and Mansfield Correctional Institution, into one unit at Chillicothe, LoParo said.
The consolidation will add hundreds of maximum-security prison cells at the Mansfield and Youngstown facilities, which will be used to separate the state’s most violent and difficult-to-manage inmates from the general prison population, LoParo said.
In a retrial in September, Dean, 37, was convicted of killing Titus Arnold, a youth counselor, in 2005. Dean and a 16-year-old accomplice, Joshua Wade, robbed Arnold of $6 as he left work.
Prosecutors said Dean tried to shoot Arnold, but his gun jammed, so he manipulated Wade into shooting Arnold.
A search through hundreds of pages documenting Dean’s history in Ohio’s prison system turned up numerous acts of violence.
Dean was convicted of attempted escape and vandalism for throwing a chair through the ballistics-glass window of the Clark County Jail last spring. A cell search in the Madison Correctional Facility in 1995 turned up a handmade knife Dean admitted to making. In 2004, guards confiscated a 18-inch piece of metal sharpened to look like a sword that Dean taped to his arm while in the recreation yard.
In addition, Dean was documented for numerous assaults against other inmates dating back to the early 1990s.
There’s no question at the Clark County prosecutor’s office, Wilson said, that “as long as he’s breathing,” Dean is a danger.
“Even being locked up, he’s still a danger to everyone he comes into contact with,” Wilson said.
The other inmates who will stay in Youngstown are: James Were, 54; Keith Lamar, 42; Carlos Sanders, 48; Jason Robb, 44; and Edward Lang, 24.
Robb was convicted of a 1984 homicide in Montgomery County.
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