FOLSOM, Calif. — An inmate's death a California State Prison, Sacramento is being investigated as a homicide.
Around 12 p.m. on Thursday, officials doing a count found Tou Thao, 38, lying unresponsive on the floor of his cell. An alarm was sounded as staff attempted CPR while waiting for an air ambulance to him to the hospital.
Despite being taken to the hospital, Thao would be pronounced dead at 12:42 p.m. Thao was serving a six-year sentence for second degree robbery with force likely to produce great bodily injury. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation received him for that sentence in 2016.
45-year-old Jose Negrete, Thao's cellmate, was identified as the suspect and placed in segregated housing while the investigation continues.
Negrete was received by the department back in January of 1997. He was serving a life sentence with possibility of parole for sodomy with force, kidnapping, sexual battery, attempted penetration with a foreign object, sodomy in concert with force, and attempted oral copulation.
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