Federal agents showed up unannounced early yesterday at a Tallahassee, Fl., federal detention facility to arrest six guards. Something went badly wrong, says the Miami Herald. Within minutes of the agents’ arrival, one of the six guards about to be arrested got a revolver. Shots were exchanged between the startled agents and the guard. In seconds, guard Ralph Hill, 43, was dead. So was William ”Buddy” Sentner, 44, an Orlando-based agent with the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General. A third victim, a prison lieutenant, was seriously injured but was expected to survive. FBI agent Michael Folmar said the guards did not know they were about to be arrested. Guards in the prison are not supposed to be armed.
A check of Florida records showed that Hill once had a concealed-weapons permit, but it expired in 1999. Folmar said an FBI ”shooting review” team was en route to Tallahassee and would attempt to piece together what happened. The arrests were part of a yearlong federal investigation into lurid allegations involving six prison guards and 15 female inmates at the prison, a low-security facility three miles from downtown Tallahassee that houses nearly 1,500 inmates. An indictment returned Tuesday charged that Hill and four other guards engaged in ”sexual contact” with eight inmates between September 2003 and May 2005. In exchange for sex, the guards gave inmates contraband, including marijuana, alcohol and money, the indictment said.