Jessup Inmates Stab Guard 7 Times

A guard at the maximum-security Maryland House of Correction in Jessup was stabbed seven times yesterday in an attack that authorities said might have involved as many as three inmates.

The victim, a guard at the prison since November, was rushed by helicopter to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where Gov. Martin O'Malley paid a visit and correctional officers gathered for a vigil. Because the victim's family had not been notified, his name was not released, officials said.

The officer was conscious and able to speak, said a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, and doctors at the hospital did not consider his wounds to be life-threatening. "The officer is stable, and it does look like he's going to be okay," said the spokesman, Mark A. Vernarelli.

Although several inmates might have participated in the attack, investigators think the officer's primary assailant was a 38-year-old man serving a life sentence for two murders, Vernarelli said. He declined to identify the suspect.

The stabbing followed by less than a year a surge of violence at the prison in Anne Arundel County that culminated in the July slaying of David W. McGuinn, the first correctional officer to be killed inside a Maryland prison since 1984. Two inmates are charged with murder in that stabbing.

McGuinn was attacked as he conducted a head count while the prison was locked down. Investigators have said a device commonly used to prevent cell doors from locking was found near the cell of one of the alleged assailants.

In the months leading up to McGuinn's death, two corrections officers at the facility were stabbed and seriously wounded, and three inmates were killed.

The circumstances of the stabbing yesterday were not immediately clear. Vernarelli said the population of the prison, which had 842 inmates yesterday, has been reduced significantly since McGuinn's death.