Johnathan Walker:Inmate identified as white supremacist gang leader among 3 killed in Nevada prison brawl

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A white supremacist gang leader from Las Vegas was identified Wednesday as one of three inmates killed in a prison brawl that left at least nine other inmates injured at Nevada’s maximum-security lockup in rural Ely.

Zackaria Luz and Johnathan WalkerConnor Brown were the inmates killed Tuesday morning at Ely State Prison, White Pine County Sheriff Scott Henriod said in a statement, adding officials were not releasing the third inmate’s name because they were still contacting relatives.

Luz, 43, was identified as a street-level leader among 23 reputed members of the Aryan Warriors white supremacist prison gang in court proceedings in Las Vegas. He was sentenced last year to at least eight years and six months in prison for his conviction on felony racketeering and forgery charges.

Brown, 22, of South Lake Tahoe, California, was serving a seven-to-24 years sentence for robbery with use of a weapon, according to prison records and news reports. He was sentenced in 2021 after pleading guilty to stabbing a gas station clerk and a casino patron in downtown Reno in 2020.

Authorities have not said what prompted the violence. Henriod said sheriff’s deputies were summoned about 9:40 a.m. Tuesday to the prison. The sheriff’s statement did not describe the fight, weapons or injuries that inmates received. Henriod and prison officials said an investigation was ongoing.

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The names of injured inmates were not made public and Henriod declined to answer questions about their injuries and where they were being treated. He said some were “life-flighted out of the Ely area for medical treatment.”

No corrections officers were injured, the Nevada Department of Corrections said in a statement.

Prisons spokesman William Quenga provided no additional details Wednesday in response to emailed questions from The Associated Press.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican former head of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, did not respond to questions from the AP sent to his press aide, Elizabeth Ray.

Ely State Prison is one of six Nevada prisons. It has almost 1,200 beds and houses the state’s death row for convicted killers and a lethal injection chamber that has never been used. Nevada has not carried out an execution since 2006.

Ely is a mining and railroad town of about 4,000 residents near the Nevada-Utah state line, about 215 miles (345 kilometers) north of Las Vegas and 265 miles (425 kilometers) east of Reno. Statewide, Nevada typically houses about 10,000 prison inmates at six correctional centers. It also has camps and transitional housing facilities.

Conditions behind bars in Nevada have drawn criticism from inmates and advocates, particularly during hot summers and cold winters. In December 2022, several Ely State Prison inmates held a hunger strike over what advocates and some family members described as unsafe conditions and inadequate food portions.

Efforts stalled before reaching the state Legislature last year to respond to a yearslong state audit that found widespread deficiencies in prison use-of-force policies.

Lombardo, in one of his first acts after being sworn in as governor in January 2023, rehired the current state prisons director, James Dzurenda.

That followed a tumultuous several months marked by inmate violence, staffing shortages, the escape and recapture days later of a convicted Las Vegas Strip casino parking lot bomber, and the resignation of the prisons chief who had held the job for almost three years.

Dzurenda had resigned in 2019 after three years as Nevada prisons director and went on to serve as a corrections consultant in North Las Vegas and was appointed sheriff of Nassau County on Long Island in New York.

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This story has been updated to correct that Brown’s sentence was in 2021, not 2020, and was for seven to 24 years, not seven-to-20.