Maui inmate strangled, autopsy finds

An Arizona medical examiner said Friday the Aug. 6 death of a 21-year-old Maui inmate was a homicide by strangulation and smothering.

Pima County, Ariz., Chief Medical Examiner Gregory Hess was called in to perform an autopsy on Johnathan Namauleg, who died at Saguaro Correctional Center.

There were signs of smothering and injuries consistent with strangulation to the musculature of the neck and to the thyroid cartilage or hyoid bone, Hess said.

However, no ligature abrasions were found, Hess said. “It could be some kind of sleeper hold,” he said.

“How that strangulation occurred, we just don’t know,” he said.

Hawaii Department of Public Safety officials said Jason Lee McCormick alerted guards about the condition of Namauleg, his cellmate. Saguaro officials said McCormick was removed from the general population immediately following the incident and is housed alone.

McCormick was convicted in the 1996 murder of a professor in his Waikiki apartment by using a sleeper hold.

The Eloy Police Department is conducting the criminal investigation, but no one with knowledge of the case could be reached Friday.

The Department of Public Safety deferred questions on the investigation to Eloy police.

Namauleg was found 3:15 p.m. Aug. 6 unconscious and lying facedown on the prison cell floor after McCormick alerted guards he needed medical help. An emergency response team and medical staff arrived and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Public Safety said. He was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5 p.m.

Public Safety spokeswoman Toni Schwartz said Namauleg was classified as a high-custody inmate, and McCormick was considered a medium-custody inmate.

Namauleg, of Kahului, had been sentenced to probation in January 2013 for third-degree arson for setting fire to a canoe club hale’s pili grass roof on July 26, 2012, after he was kicked out of the area, the Maui News reported. He was resentenced June 2014 to five years’ imprisonment for violating probation.

Schwartz said prisoners are housed by security classification, which includes the crime and many other factors.

“The demise of Johnathan Namauleg seems very similar to the attack of Jason Lee McCormick on my client George Rowan (in 2013),” attorney Andre Wooten said in an email to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after an Aug. 8 story ran. “And also because of that attack, the Department of Public Safety should have been on notice of the danger to anyone housed in a cell with the ‘sleep(er) hold killer’ Jason Lee McCormick.”

Rowan, a former cellmate of McCormick’s at Oahu Community Correctional Center, is alleging in a lawsuit that he was nearly killed when McCormick tried to use a sleeper hold on him.

During the night of June 1, 2013, Rowan awoke to McCormick attacking him, forcing Rowan to “fight for his life to prevent being choked to death, and in the process plaintiff Rowan suffered a severely separated and torn shoulder,” says Rowan’s lawsuit, filed June against the Department of Public Safety, McCormick and a Public Safety nurse in Oahu Circuit Court. The suit was removed to federal district court.

The complaint alleges Public Safety and its employee negligently violated DPS rules by placing a nonsentenced prisoner in a cell with a recently sentenced felon, but McCormick wasn’t convicted until June 26, 2013, and was sentenced Sept. 11, 2013.

The state filed a cross-claim against McCormick.

A deputy attorney general representing the state declined comment since the case is ongoing.

In the 1996 murder case, McCormick confessed, alleging the victim, professor Robert Henderson from the University of Pittsburgh, made unwanted sexual advances.

Henderson’s nude, decomposing body was found with the words, “I rape young boys so I must die,” written on his buttocks and a pen stuck in one of his legs.

Wooten said Rowan told him McCormick had attacked a couple of other inmates before him.

Rowan was awaiting trial on a nonviolent felony drug possession charge.

Although McCormick was never formally charged with the assault on Rowan, prison and medical records support his allegations, Wooten said.

Wooten said Namauleg was not not as big and capable of defending himself as was Rowan, who stands 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs more than 200 pounds.

Namauleg, at 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 135 pounds, was small in comparison with McCormick, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 195 pounds, according to the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center website.