A Bartholomew County jail inmate is recovering in the jail’s medical unit after a battery incident involving an incarcerated member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Sheriff’s Department deputies are investigating the incident, which happened in the jail on Thursday, Sheriff Matt Myers said.
He declined to release names of the individuals involved, but said the person considered the aggressor in the incident was believed to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
However, it is unknown whether that gang affiliation has a direct connection to the battery, which resulted in the victim being transported to Columbus Regional Hospital for treatment before being returned to the jail’s medical unit, the sheriff said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
“What we are getting at this point is that the incident was a dispute over property,” Myers said.
The aggressor in the incident has been placed in a segregated block of the jail on lockdown following the incident, Myers said. With that status, the individual cannot have contact with the general jail population or inmates in the medical unit, he said.
The victim will remain in the medical unit and will not go into the jail’s general population until the investigation is complete, Myers said.
The jail incident occurred less than a week after local police provided details of a year-long investigation into a group affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood, believed to be operating out of a home southwest of Taylorsville in Bartholomew County.
Since October 2017, investigators have been looking into individuals who lived or went in and out of a home in the 4100 block of County Road 500N, where they had found earlier evidence of materials linked to the nationally-known prison gang.
Nine people were rounded up and charged with a variety of felony drug-related and criminal gang activity charges, and some were also accused of battery and trafficking with an inmate.
Investigators said the individuals who lived at the home or visited there were responsible for dealing large amounts of methamphetamine and heroin and had been involved in numerous burglaries and vehicle thefts.
Some of the nine individuals were arrested far before the Nov. 9 announcement of the roundup and had already bonded out of jail, jail officials said. But others who identify with the Aryan Brotherhood remain incacerated in the Columbus jail with high bonds, ranging from $326,000 to $1.12 million each.
The Aryan Brotherhood is described as the nation’s oldest major white supremacist prison gang and national crime syndicate by the Southern Poverty Law Center. However, local investigators said the individuals who were arrested were not involved in race-related crime here.
Instead, the local members were focused on the financially driven motive of stealing items and drug trafficking, investigators said. In the Columbus area home where the search warrant was served in early November, detectives found two vehicles, an all-terrain vehicle, a go-kart, a handgun, large amounts of electronics, a television, lawn equipment and tools, all believed to have been stolen, police said.
