Prison guards and KKK members Charles Newcomb (l.) and David
Elliot Moran were found guilty in a murder plot.
(ALACHUA
COUNTY JAIL)
Two former Florida prison guards who
were also
Ku Klux Klan members have been found guilty of
plotting to kill a
black inmate after his release.
The murder plot involving Elliot
Moran and Charles
Newcomb started after a third guard, another Klan member,
was
bitten during a fight with the inmate. Moran, Newcomb
and Thomas Driver, the
third guard, believed the inmate was
infected with HIV and hepatitis.
Newcomb, Moran and Driver would
enlist an FBI informant
to kill the former inmate, and all three men were
arrested in 2015.
Driver pleaded guilty in March and
was sentenced to four years in prison.
A Columbia County jury found Moran and
Newcomb guilty of conspiracy
to commit first-degree murder, Attorney General
Pam Bondi's office said Tuesday.
"We will continue to work daily
to ensure the KKK or any other
hate-filled organization is unable to inflict
violence on the citizens
of our great state," Bondi said in a news
release.
During the multi-agency
investigation, the former guards were caught
on tape discussing the murder plot
with the informant. At one point the
guards discussed shooting the former
inmate if poisoning him with
insulin did not work, according to the Washington Post.
"If we have to do pow-pow, we
will," Newcomb told Moran and the
informant at one point, according to an
affidavit obtained by the
Washington Post.
Newcomb called himself the
"Exalted Cyclops" of the
Ku Klux Klan chapter, the newspaper
reported.
During the elaborate sting, the
guards were tricked into
thinking that the former inmate had been murdered.
"Photographs were shown to each
of the men. They expressed
happiness," state prosecutor Nick Cox told WJXT. "They shook
the source's hand and the source
even went to the point of asking
is this what you wanted."
At the time, Driver and Moran were
guards at the Department of
Corrections Reception and Medical Center in rural
north Florida.
Newcomb was a former correctional officer who had been fired in
2013.
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