Inmate’s death is third suspected homicide at California’s New Folsom prison in four months

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials believe the death of an incarcerated man Saturday morning in California State Prison, Sacramento, was a homicide.

Kyle Cooper, 50, died at the hospital two hours after staff at the prison near Folsom responded to an alarm and found him in his cell with severe head trauma. A written statement released by CDCR said a doctor pronounced him dead at 5:40 a.m.

The other man who lived with Cooper in the cell, Rahshan Mackey, 38, has been transferred to restricted housing, which is often referred to as solitary confinement.

Cooper had been in the prison since the summer of 2015. He had been sentenced to 37 years for a charges related to committing a robbery with a firearm. Mackey is serving a 23-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter. While in prison, he was additionally sentenced to two years and eight months for an assault with a deadly weapon on another imprisoned person, CDCR officials said.

Cooper’s death is the third suspected homicide in the Folsom prison announced in the past four months.

In July and August , the state prison agency announced it was investigating the in-custody deaths of Randy Schlaepfer, 55, and Darryl W. Hudson, 40, at the Folsom prison as homicide, respectively. In both cases, officials said that staff witnessed the attacks, which turned deadly before they stopped them.

The prison facility is sometimes referred to as New Folsom to distinguish it from the next-door Folsom State Prison.