San Quentin State Prison officials are saying it’s a homicide after a 70-year-old child molestation convict was found unresponsive in his cell and later died, and his 36-year-old kidnapping convict cellmate is suspected of doing the deed.
There's trouble at Marin County’s San Quentin State Prison this week, or as Gavin Newsom would prefer you now call it, “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.” KTVU reports that 70-year-old inmate Mark Squires was killed in his cell Tuesday afternoon between 3:30 and 4 pm. And the suspect is the only person who was in the cell with Squires at the time, 36-year-old Gustavo Lopez.
A convicted child molester was found dead inside his cell at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. The death is being investigated as a homicide. https://t.co/vO0gXiwSZR
— KRON4 News (@kron4news) September 19, 2024
According to KRON4, the victim, Squires, was serving life without parole for sexually abusing a child under the age of 14 in Riverside County, and he’s been at San Quentin for 24 years. Lopez, meanwhile, had served four years of a 13-year sentence for kidnapping and false imprisonment, also committed in Riverside County.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is classifying the case as a homicide. They say that Lopez has been “placed in restricted housing pending investigation by SQRC [San Quentin Rehabilitation Center] Investigative Services Unit and the Marin County District Attorney’s Office.”
The Marin County Coroner has not yet determined Squires’s official cause of death, and we do not have any further information on what kinds of injuries he suffered.
As KTVU points out, there was another homicide in San Quentin just this past April. On April 24, 50-year-old Joshua Jones, was suspected of killing his 43-year-old cellmate James Healy, 43.
Related: The Prisoner Who Attacked Kristin Smart’s Killer Also Killed the I-5 Strangler in Prison [SFist]
Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons
