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The New Mexico inmate accused of killing convicted Hawaii murderer and rapist Frank Pauline Jr. was in prison for fatally shooting two people in the head when he was 15 years old.
Daniel Thomas Hood, 34, is charged with killing Pauline on April 27 in the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility. A New Mexico grand jury returned the indictment last month charging Hood with Pauline’s murder. Hood’s arraignment is scheduled for this month.
April 27 was Pauline’s 42nd birthday.
Pauline was serving three life prison terms for the 1991 Christmas Eve abduction, rape and murder of Dana Ireland.
The New Mexico State Police Investigations Bureau said in state court documents that Hood admitted that he killed Pauline by hitting him in the back of the head with a rock wrapped in a shirt and, after Pauline fell to the ground, hit him two more times.
The New Mexico State Department of Public Safety said in a news release that Hood confessed to state police that he killed Pauline "because he was a snitch and he walked around like he owned the place."
Hood was charged and convicted as an adult in Minnesota for a 1996 double murder.
The West Central Tribune reported that Hood, who was 15 at the time, shot and killed an 81-year-old New London woman and the woman’s neighbor, a 51-year-old man. Hood was from the neighboring town of Spicer.
The Tribune reported that Hood killed his victims with a .22-caliber handgun he had stolen from a home in a burglary the day before. Hood was supposed to be under house arrest at the time of the murders for stealing his grandmother’s car and driving it to Montana.
Hood’s lawyer said the Spicer teenager hijacked his victims while they were giving him a ride in the elderly woman’s car to another town and directed them to a rural cornfield.
When they arrived at the cornfield, Hood ordered his victims out of the car, fired six shots at his male victim, reloaded and fired at least one more shot into the man’s head. Then as his elderly female victim was kneeling on the ground praying and begging for mercy, Hood shot her once in the face and once in the head, according to an account of the killing provided by Hood’s lawyer, the Tribune reported.
Hood pleaded guilty to first- and second-degree murder after a Minnesota judge ordered the teenager to face the charges as an adult and the state’s supreme court refused to consider an appeal of the judge’s order.
The Tribune reported that at sentencing, the prosecutor described the then-17-year-old Hood as a predator, "a person who’s going to continue to target the weakest people in society."
The judge sentenced Hood to life in prison for the first-degree murder of the 81-year-old woman plus an additional 25 years for the second-degree murder of his other victim. Hood will be eligible to ask for parole in 2043.
A New Mexico Corrections Department spokeswoman says Hood is incarcerated in New Mexico under an interstate compact. She said the average population of the Las Cruces facility is about 700 inmates in four different security levels.
On the day of Pauline’s murder, Hood and Pauline were in general population. The spokeswoman said Pauline had been in segregation April 11-25, but she was not able to say why.
Pauline was in New Mexico under a formal interstate agreement along with eight other Hawaii inmates, said Toni Schwartz, Hawaii Department of Public Safety spokeswoman. She said the state sent Pauline to New Mexico in December 2012 because he is a validated member of a security threat group, or prison gang, who had conflicts with members of other gangs.
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