A Tarrant County inmate being held on charges of sexual abuse of a child and indecency stabbed a corrections officer as he was being transported from John Peter Smith Hospital back to the Lon Evans Corrections Center downtown, officials say.
The attack happened at about 3 p.m. when the corrections officer pulled over at Crawford Street and East Rosedale Street after the inmate had some kind of issue in the back seat.
That's when the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department said Victor Ramires, 31, stabbed the officer with a "homemade weapon" in the neck and face area.
The officer, identified as Willie Claiborne, is a 12-year veteran of the department. He was taken to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth by MedStar. Sheriff's spokesman Terry Grisham said it appears his injuries are not severe.
Brent Edmon works at the Baker Funeral Home. He said he saw the van pull alongside the home as he was going out for lunch.
"The young man was in the back of the van on the floor out of the wheelchair," he said. "He told the young man, 'If you would sit down and be still, he wouldn't have fallen out of the wheelchair.'"
Edmon said by the time he returned with lunch he saw numerous sheriff's and Fort Worth police vehicles along Rosedale and Crawford.
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Sheriff's investigators are now looking into when Ramires acquired the weapon and what charges he could now face.
Ramires lost his lower legs in the fall when he was struck by a train while fleeing U.S. Marshals, who were searching for him after he missed a court appearance.
Finding homemade weapons on inmates is not something unusual for jail officers to deal with, said Grisham.
"Homemade weapons are a constant battle inside jails," he said. "Contraband of all kinds goes on daily, hourly. And our officers are trained from day one that they have to combat that. The biggest foe that we have in the jail business is complacency. You may make the same hospital run 100 times, and that one time where maybe you're distracted or whatever something bad can happen. But luckily it sounds like our officer was able to defend himself. This could have been a lot worse that it was and we're thankful for that."
No one else was injured. Ramires was the only inmate in the van at the time.
