Police: Clark County jail inmate killed during fight with cellmate

By Aida Ahmed

Friday, July 29, 2011 | 12:06 p.m.

An 18-year-old man accused of hearing "devils" before killing a relative is now also accused of killing his cellmate overnight during an altercation in the Clark County Detention Center.

Carl Guilford will be charged with murder in the slaying of his cellmate, Metro Police said this morning. A corrections officer discovered the injured cellmate about 1:21 a.m. Friday while conducting a routine bed check. He was given immediate emergency assistance from jail personnel but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The victim’s identity, cause and manner of death have not yet been released. Metro Police say this is the first incident of an inmate being killed in the detention center since 1979.

Investigators believe the two men got into an altercation and that Guilford stabbed his cellmate with a pencil.

Guilford was being held in jail pending murder charges in the death of his 6-year-old nephew, Christopher Montgomery, which occurred May 26 in the 1400 block of East Desert Inn Road. He was accused of suffocating the boy with a blanket. Guilford is scheduled for a competency hearing Aug. 2 in district court on that case.

According to a police report from that earlier case, Guilford admitted to hearing voices of "devils" and his mother described her son to police as a “troubled young man” who had been acting strange for the past three to six months after he allegedly had been smoking marijuana that she said might have been laced with something.

That had “changed him,” according to his mother, who also told police Guilford would regularly speak of spirits and the “Illuminati,” and had mentioned making sacrifices. Others at his house also described Guilford as troubled.