Officials say gangs using cell phones in prison

MANGUM, Okla. (AP) – Every case tells Greer County Assistant District Attorney Eric Yarborough a story. But the cluster of homicide cases that crowd his office shelf tell an epic -- one that perhaps revolves around a new era of communication for prison gangs.

Yarborough has seven pending homicide cases from inside the walls of the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, involving 14 defendants.

Six of the killings happened in the past three years, and account for 31.6 percent of Oklahoma’s 19 prison homicides dating back to 2006, state Corrections Department spokesman Jerry Massie said.

“All of these cases have tentacles back to these prison gangs,” Yarborough said as he sifted through the cases last week.

“A lot of these murders we’ll probably never know why they occurred, but I think they speak to the communication that these gangs now have from one prison to another. It used to be prisons have a much tighter control on communication. Every telephone conversation was taped. Letters were read.

“But now I think a lot of these gangs are smuggling cell phones into these prisons, and are able to communicate with fellow gang members in other prisons almost instantly.”

Yarborough bases his theory on circumstantial evidence and a strong hunch.

In March 2008, Brian Abernathy--serving life for a murder in Ottawa County -- arrived at the Granite prison and was promptly greeted by four suspected members of the Aryan Brotherhood, Yarborough said.

A court affidavit stated Abernathy was later found motionless in his cell and was soon pronounced dead from “multiple blunt force trauma to the head.”

Yarborough’s hunch is shared by prison officials.

Last month, Oklahoma County prosecutors filed six first-degree murder charges against David Allen Tyner, an American Indian who was accused of killing an Hispanic man he once worked for as a bodyguard, three women and two unborn children. The next day a series of fights broke out between American Indian and Hispanic gangs at prisons in Hominy, Cushing and Granite.

“There’s probably something to that (Yarbrough’s theory),” Massie said. “We had three different incidents at three different prisons within an hour and a half of each other. We suspected those were coordinated.”

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Information from: The Oklahoman, http://www.newsok.com