By Alan Johnson

The Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio prisons officials suspended two corrections officers yesterday in connection with the Sept. 3 suicide of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man serving a life sentence for holding three women captive for nearly a decade.

Caleb Ackley, 26, and Ryan Murphy, 27, corrections officers at the Orient Correctional Institution, were placed on administrative leave with pay pending results of an investigation “to determine if our policy and protocol were followed appropriately,” said JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Smith said Ackley and Murphy were on duty in the special-management housing unit at the prison about 20 miles south of Columbus on the night Castro hanged himself in his cell with a bedsheet. Both men have worked for the prison system for nearly six years.

That brings to four the number of state corrections officers on paid suspension because of high-profile suicides.

Billy Slagle, 44, a convicted murderer from Cleveland, was found hanging in his cell on Death Row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution early on Aug. 4, just hours before he was to go on 24-hour suicide watch and three days before his scheduled execution. Clay Putnam, 19, and John McCollister, 30, remain on paid administrative leave pending the conclusion of that investigation.

Castro, 53, who held three women captive in his Cleveland home for nearly a decade, was found hanging in his cell at 9:20 p.m. on Sept. 3. Prison medical staff performed CPR before taking him to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 10:52 p.m.

The three women Castro kidnapped disappeared separately between 2002 and 2004, when they were 14, 16 and 20 years old. They escaped on May 6 when one broke part of a door and yelled to neighbors for help. Castro was arrested that evening.

Castro’s suicide was the seventh in an Ohio prison this year. However, another inmate death yesterday could push that to eight. James Blackburn, 31, of Trumbull County, was found in his cell at the Lebanon Correctional Institution in Warren County at 2:09 a.m. and was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later. Smith said the State Highway Patrol is investigating Blackburn’s death as a potential suicide. He was serving a 21-year sentence for multiple rape convictions.

There have been 35 inmate suicides in Ohio prisons since 2008, a total about in line with the national average for similar-size prison systems. A review team appointed by prisons director Gary Mohr, drawn from the agency’s legal, medical, mental-health, security and operational divisions, is to complete a report on Castro’s death by the end of the month.