EVERETT — A Snohomish County Jail inmate awaiting trial for assault has been placed in maximum security after allegedly beating his cellmate.
The cellmate reported that he’d been strangled, kicked in the face, stomped on and had his head slammed into a concrete wall, causing him to lose consciousness. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he received stitches to an eyelid after a kick to the eye, police wrote.
The injured man told investigators the attack came out of nowhere and he has no idea why.
While in the cell on Friday afternoon, the suspect reportedly asked him if he knew where he was. When the cellmate replied that he was in jail, the suspect, a Snohomish man, allegedly grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him off the bed and beat him. He also denied him access to a call button to summon corrections deputies, according to court papers.
The suspect, 49, has been moved to a maximum security unit, sheriff’s office spokeswoman Shari Ireton said. That means he is housed alone and has a corrections deputy detail assigned to him when he moves around the jail.
The inmate has a lengthy criminal history of felony and misdemeanor assaults. He also has spent time behind bars for failing to register as a sex offender after a 1998 conviction for raping a 12-year-old girl.
More recently, he was charged with second-degree assault. He was accused of repeatedly punching his girlfriend in the head and suffocating and strangling her inside a Snohomish home last month. The victim was taken to the hospital. Police reported that her right eye was black and swollen shut and that her face, stomach and arm were bruised. She told police she believed he would have killed her if there weren’t other people in the house.
The woman told investigators she believed the man was stalking a former girl friend and that she saw a knife, latex gloves and zip ties in his backpack.
In 2013, the man was arrested in Everett after attacking another former girlfriend with a bicycle chain that had a lock on it. She, too, ended up in the hospital and reported that she was struck more than 20 times. He has had 16 separate protective orders filed against him since 1997.
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446, stevick@heraldnet.com.
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