Prison Guard Freed
Prison officials say the standoff at Texas' death row is over and the hostage prison guard is free.
Prison officials say corrections officer Jeanette Bledsoe is safe, more than 13 hours after she was taken hostage in a new prison that was supposed to be more secure.
The hostage situation ended about 5 a.m. after negotiators brought in Houston death penalty opponents at the request of the inmates.
"It was a tense situation that ended happily," said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Larry Fitzgerald.
Bledsoe was being examined at a prison infirmary. There is no word yet on the fate of the two death-row inmates who took her captive. The two also were part of a botched 19998 escape.
Prison officials are having a news conference later Tuesday.
The guard was taking one inmate back to his cell at about 4:15 p.m. Wedneday when he and another inmate overpowered her, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Larry Fitzgerald. One inmate had somehow jimmied his cell door, Fitzgerald said.
The guard was handcuffed with one leg shackled. She was seated on the floor in a small cage-like room adjacent to death row in the Terrell unit.
In talks with negotiators, the inmates complained it takes six months to make changes in visitation lists. They also want to be allowed out of their cells for longer than one hour a day.
"Basically it's complaints about conditions in the prison," Fitzgerald said.
One inmate had a makeshift knife; the other had a 2-foot long piece of metal used to open the dinner door on each prison cell.
The inmates were identified as Ponchai Wilkerson, 28 condemned for the robbery and shooting of a Houston jewelry store clerk, and Howard Guidry, 23, on death row for shooting a woman in a murder-for-hire plot.
Death row inmates are being relocated to the more modern and secure Terrell unit from the Ellis unit near Huntsville because of an escape attempt by seven inmates there in 1998. One inmate made it out but drowned in a creek about a mile from the prison. The two inmates who took the hostage Monday participated in that botched escape.