The Air Force said Monday that an airman awaiting transfer to a military prison to serve time for sexual assault of a child died at a detention facility on Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland last week.

Robert Dean Brice, 24, was found unresponsive Thursday and later pronounced dead at Brooke Army Medical Center, according to a statement from Maj. Kim Bender, a spokeswoman for the joint base. She could not confirm if his death was a suicide, saying it was under investigation.

It was the first death in custody at the facility since it opened in 1999, Bender said.

Brice was sentenced to eight years in prison at a military court proceeding on Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo just before Thanksgiving, the public affairs office there said. The court reduced him to airman basic, the lowest rank, after convicting him of two counts of sexual assault of a child, four counts of sexual abuse of a child, attempted sexual abuse of a child and possession of child pornography.

He was given a dishonorable discharge.

A San Angelo Police Department release posted online Sept. 8, 2017 said Brice was from Alabama and initially charged with online solicitation of a minor under 14. He had been arrested near Bell Park the night before, following a joint investigation by the department’s Crimes Against Children unit and the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations.

The arrest warrant included a sexual assault charge and the accompanying affidavit detailed how investigators heard Brice discussing an earlier sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl, the San Angelo Standard Times reported.

Guards found Brice, who had been at the JBSA-Lackland Confinement Facility since Oct. 8, during a routine check and tried to revive him, Bender said. She said inmates can’t move freely in the 31-bed facility and their liberties depend on their security classification. Brice was a maximum-security inmate.

Bender said Brig. Gen. Laura Lenderman, commander of Joint Base San Antonio, ordered the Lackland confinement facility termporarily closed following the death. The base relocated two other prisoners.

Brice had been in the Air Force for a little more than four years. He graduated from basic training at Lackland in October 2015 and was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California for language training. He arrived at Goodfellow for additional training in September 2017 and was a Korean cryptologic language analyst.

The Air Force said the judge in Brice’s case ordered him examined by a sanity board. It did not say what the panel of experts found.

sigc@express-news.net