SACRAMENTO — Months after he was convicted of ordering murders throughout the California prison system, an imprisoned leader of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang allegedly attacked two corrections officers who were escorting him back to his cell.
Ronald Dean Yandell, 62, allegedly drew a knife on two prison guards as they were escorting him to his cell from a medical appointment at California State Prison, Sacramento on Nov. 22. No staff were injured in the fight, but they did deploy pepper spray on Yandell, causing him to drop the weapon, according to a news release by the state prison system.
The incident came two months after a different corrections officer injured Yandell during a transport, allegedly knocking him down and striking him while he was handcuffed. Yandell had filed a lawsuit alleging prison and federal authorities retaliated against him for political advocacy work just days before he was injured.
Yandell, a former West Contra Costa resident, has not been charged in connection with the Nov. 22 incident, but it was being treated as a double attempted murder, authorities said. Prison officials say they plan to send the case to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office.
Yandell is currently awaiting sentencing in a federal racketeering case, where he was convicted of conspiracies to commit murder, smuggle drugs and other contraband in prison and serving as a leader of the notorious prison gang. Most of the convictions centered on a wiretap of Yandell’s contraband cellphone in the late 2010s, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Tensions have been brewing in the Sacramento prison where Yandell and his co-defendants are housed. One of his co-defendants, Brant Daniel, recently accused prison staff of attempting to set him up to be killed through a planned transfer to a prison in Corcoran. Another of Yandell’s co-defendants, Danny Troxell, traded death threats with him during their trial last March, before both men were convicted.
Yandell is also known for political advocacy work, having helped arranged a peace treaty between rival prison gangs and serving as a leader of a prison-wide hunger strike in the early 2010s. The strike helped scale back the rampant use of solitary confinement. He has accused law enforcement of retaliating against him by bringing on the racketeering case, though a federal judge recently denied a motion to throw out the convictions based on those grounds.
If Yandell is charged in Sacramento court, it’s unlikely to have much effect on his life trajectory. He is already serving a life sentence for murder and manslaughter convictions in Contra Costa, and faces a life sentence in the federal case.
The incident is the third bit of violence being treated as an attempted murder of a prison staffer in California so far this month. All three incidents occurred at different prisons and do not appear to be related.