SOLEDAD — Three California prisoners with alleged ties to organized crime are suspected of murdering an Aryan Brotherhood member at Salinas Valley State Jail, authorities introduced Thursday.
Todd “Fox” Morgan, 57, of Santa Clara County, was killed with “improvised weapons” by Todd Givens, 56, Ray Waldron, 51, and Robert England, 61, on a jail yard a bit of earlier than 10 a.m. Thursday, in accordance with the California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The three suspects have been moved to restrictive housing.
Morgan was serving state sentences for theft, housebreaking, medicine, gun possession, and enhancements beneath the Three Strikes Regulation, authorities stated. He was additionally serving a 21-year federal jail sentence associated to a big scale drug ring he allegedly ran, leading to a 2020 federal indictment focusing on the Aryan Brotherhood, the Fresno-based Fresnecks gang, and different all-white teams.
In the course of the investigation, police seized communications between Morgan and others — utilizing contraband cellphones — the place they focus on operating medicine inside and outdoors of jail, and easy methods to get in contact with fellow gang members, in accordance with courtroom data. Morgan reportedly ran the drug ring with fellow Salinas Valley State Jail inmate Kenneth Bash, who, like Morgan, pleaded responsible.
Morgan’s theft and housebreaking convictions stem from an incident the place he alleged attacked a safety guard after breaking into Santa Clara College in 2000. In 2009, he was convicted of assault for attacking one other inmate at Salinas Valley, and in 2014, the Californian, a Salinas-based newspaper, recognized him as a suspect in an incident the place 4 inmates attacked two others with knives, leaving one useless and one injured.
The jail drug ring concerned the coordination of multi-pound offers on the surface, even in different states, in addition to smuggling of methamphetamine and heroin into the jail, courtroom data present. In a single occasion, a person tried to throw a drug-filled soccer over a jail wall.
Givens, a former inmate of San Quentin’s demise row who goes by “Stomper,” is a suspected member of the Nazi Low Riders jail gang who has been concerned in different violence behind bars, together with the stabbing of a now deceased Aryan Brotherhood hitman, and the slashing of a jail guard’s face. Waldron, a suspect member of the Mongols Bike Membership, is incarcerated for a 2003 homicide in San Diego, Courtroom Data present.
England was named by federal prosecutors as an inmate allegedly focused for homicide by the Aryan Brotherhood in 2023. Courtroom filings from January 2024 say jail officers in Sacramento seized a kite, purportedly written by Aryan Brotherhood member Pat Brady, “emphasizing” that England was to be murdered for “in search of to produce other white inmates hit with out a strong foundation for doing so.”
Authorities haven’t launched the suspected motive for the murder. Morgan was set to go earlier than a parole board in 2028.
Since 2019, federal prosecutors in Northern California have charged dozens of Aryan Brotherhood members and associates in a number of racketeering indictments, together with alleged leaders of the gang who have been charged with homicide. After two separate trials, eight Aryan Brotherhood members have been sentenced to federal jail earlier this yr for involvement in jail homicides and different crimes.
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