A 19-year-old man sentenced last year to life in prison for murder was killed by two other inmates at a state prison, California corrections officials said Tuesday.
Employees at High Desert State Prison in Susanville saw inmates Christopher Dolan and Michael Ellison attack Michael Hastey with manufactured weapons last Friday morning in an exercise yard, officials alleged.
Correctional officers broke up the attack with chemical agents and batons and started medical treatment but Hastey died about an hour later, authorities said.
Prison officials and the Lassen County Sheriff’s Office are investigating the death as a homicide.
In June, Hastey was sentenced in Trinity County to life in prison with the possibility of parole. News accounts said he was convicted as an adult for the January 2019 stabbing of Nathan Purdue during a jealous rage.
Dolan, 30, is serving a nearly six-year sentence from Ventura County for assault and resisting an officer.
Ellison, 39, is serving a life sentence with possibility of parole for a murder in Riverside County. He has been in prison since 2004. He was sentenced to additional time twice for making deadly weapons and twice for assaulting a fellow prisoner, once in 2005 and the second time in 2017.