Sheridan.sunny.JPG

The Federal Correctional Institution at Sheridan, which sits in the Willamette Valley about 50 miles southwest of downtown Portland, is the only U.S. prison in Oregon.

(Bryan Denson/The Oregonian)

A federal inmate savagely beat another prisoner with a mop handle until it broke, then kicked him repeatedly in the head with a booted foot during a Friday night altercation at the government prison in Sheridan, according to a union official who represents corrections officers.

The bloody attack, at the hands of another inmate, put the victim in a local hospital on life support, according to Michael Meserve, a regional vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees, Council of Prison Locals.

Officials ordered a lock-down at the medium-security prison 50 miles southwest of Portland, and visitation was canceled throughout the weekend.

A prison spokesman, Kyle Olsen, acknowledged the altercation in a short news release Monday afternoon.

"All inmates were returned to their cells and the institution remains secure," he wrote.

The FBI is investigating.

Prison officials did not release the names of the victim or his suspected attacker, who was moved into solitary confinement in a facility known as the Special Housing Unit. It is common practice to move inmates suspected of such assaults to other prisons.

Meserve gave this account of the attack:

A prisoner was sitting at an email station in a housing unit called 2A when another inmate approached him from behind and clubbed him on the head with a mop handle. His victim fell face down on the floor.

The attacker continued clubbing the inmate until the mop handle broke, then began kicking him in the head with his boot until at least one other prisoner restrained him.

One of the corrections officers who raced to the housing unit to help the injured man had also responded to an Oct. 13 incident in which an inmate slashed the faces of two corrections officers with a razor blade, Meserve said.

He noted that the housing unit was undergoing an hourly "open movement," with inmates returning to their indoor common area known as "The Flats." A corrections officer responsible for that unit was watching movements of other prisoners.

"I'm told that this assault happened at precisely that time," Meserve said, perhaps because the attacker knew the officer's attention would be elsewhere. "The inmates are fully aware of that dynamic."

If the critically injured inmate should die from what has been described as a massive head wound, he would become what is believed to be the first homicide victim in about a decade at the prison complex in Sheridan, the union official said.

"The employees at Sheridan are shaken by all of this," Meserve said.

About a month ago, he said, a group of inmates broke into a brawl n the Sheridan complex's minimum-security work camp. Then came the slashing of the corrections officers two weeks ago. Then Friday's brutal beating.

"This level of violence that they've seen is unusual, historically, at Sheridan," Meserve said.

-- Bryan Denson