Lucasville: What happened at the 1993 prison riot that was Ohio's longest and deadliest

In the state of Ohio, Lucasville remains synonymous with the state's largest-ever prison riot.

On Easter Sunday of 1993, more than 400 inmates at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility there took over one of three main prison cellblocks. When the uprising in the L-block section ended 11 days later, one guard and nine inmates were dead. 

"The Lucasville riot was an all-together ugly affair, a public display of the worst humankind has to offer," retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer wrote in 2005. 

What led up to the Lucasville riot? 

The siege began that April 11 as tensions and tempers flared at the Scioto County facility.  A new warden had introduced new restrictions on prisoner movements. The prison was overcrowded. Muslim inmates were upset they would soon be tested for tuberculosis with an injection that contained alcohol in violation of their religious views. 

Additionally, officials were feeling pressure from residents of southern Ohio to beef up security, after an inmate killed a female tutor at the prison in 1990.

Three prison gangs – Black Gangster Disciples, Muslims and Aryan Brotherhood – led the riot, the state would later say.

How did the Lucasville prison riot end? 

The uprising ended when prison officials agreed to 21 demands from inmates. No. 2 on the list read: “Administrative discipline and criminal proceedings will be fairly and impartially administered without bias against individuals or groups.”

The state largely violated that agreement, according to "Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising" by civil rights activist and lawyer Staughton Lynd.

Instead, some prisoners were singled out as leaders and subjected to reprisals and "twisted mockeries of trials," Lynd maintained. The state's investigation into the murders was mostly based on the testimony of inmates rather than physical evidence from the scene.

Who was killed in the Lucasville riot? 

Corrections officer Robert Vallandingham was the sole guard killed in the melee. Inmates strangled the 40-year-old veteran of the Vietnam War on April 15 and threw his body into the recreation yard. 

The inmates killed in the riot – alleged prison snitches  – were Darrell Dapina, Earl Elder, Franklin Farrell, Bruce Harris, David Sommers, Albert Staiano, William Svette, Bruce Vitale and Dennis Weaver. 

Who was convicted after the riot? 

In the aftermath, 48 inmates were convicted of committing violent crimes during the riot. Five inmates, who prosecutors named as ringleaders, were sentenced to death for their roles.

They became known as the Lucasville Five:

• Carlos A. Sanders, who now goes by Siddique Abdullah Hasan, had begun serving 10 to 25 years for aggravated robbery in Cuyahoga County in 1984. He is now 60.
• Jason Robb, 55, had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Montgomery County and sentenced to seven to 25 years in 1985.
• James Were, who goes by Namir Abdul Mateen, had begun serving six to 25 years in 1983 for aggravated robbery in Lucas County. He is now 66.
• George Skatzes, 77, was convicted of aggravated murder in Logan County. In 1983, he began serving a sentence of 15 years to life.
• Keith LaMar, who also uses Bomani Hondo Shakur, began serving 18 years to life after killing a customer in a drug deal in 1989. He is now 53.

Where are the Lucasville Five now? 

Skatzes is incarcerated at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, with 123 other male Ohio death row inmates. (The lone woman on death row is housed at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.) The other four are held at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.

All five maintain their innocence and say the state convicted them with faulty testimony from inmates who were given deals. 

They also maintain that some inmates who cooperated with investigators and prosecutors were not adequately punished.

To that, the lead prosecutor of the Lucasville cases largely agrees.

"We did the best we could with a very difficult situation," Mark Piepmeier said. "What we did was not perfect, and some inmates truly got away with murder."