Two men stabbed at Holman prison after ADOC moved assailant with decade-long history of violence and sexual assault out of segregation

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed researcher

The man the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) believes was responsible for the kidnapping, torture, rape and death of 22-year-old Daniel Williams inside Staton Correctional Facility in 2023 stabbed two other men this week at Holman Correctional Facility.

Lamont Wilson stabbed two men at Holman on Wednesday, according to multiple people who told Appleseed about the incident. One victim suffered such serious injuries and was evacuated from the prison by helicopter. ADOC has not responded to Appleseed’s questions about the attack.

“When is something going to be done with him, or is this going to be swept under the rug like my son?,” asked Mr. Williams’s father, Terry Williams, speaking to Appleseed on Friday. He’d shared a post about the Holman prison stabbing to his Facebook page on Thursday. “I can’t tell you how broken-hearted, mad and frustrated I am with all of this.”

The murder of Daniel Williams, a young father who died the day before he was scheduled to be released, made news across the country. A month later, Appleseed shared the history of ADOC’s failures leading up to his death at the Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee’s public hearing in December, 2023.

It is unclear why ADOC’s website still lists Mr. Wilson as a “medium” custody inmate, meaning he is housed in less restrictive conditions and can remain in the general prison population, despite a long history of serious assaults, sexual violence and death across state prisons. Holman, considered a level five or “maximum security” prison, includes one-person segregation cells where prisoners with disciplinary issues are secured away from the general population. Someone within ADOC decided Mr. Wilson did not need this level of security and returned him to an open dorm where weapons are readily available.

Mr. Wilson pleaded guilty in 2023 to first-degree assault in St. Clair County Circuit Court for a previous attack on an older prisoner at St. Clair Correctional Facility who was nearly killed. He originally was charged with attempted murder. The attack was also detailed in a federal lawsuit. “His assailant was able to enter his locked cell and stabbed him in his arms, chest, back, head, and neck, using two ice picks,” according to the Second Amended Complaint, filed Aug. 28, 2015. “[The victim] suffered extensive injuries to his back and neck, including chipped vertebrae, requiring treatment at UAB hospital.”

Shortly after that case was resolved, Daniel Williams was likely smothered to death, according to the state’s chief medical examiner. Evidence found on Mr. Williams’ body corroborated accounts from witnesses who said he had been kidnapped and tortured over several days inside Staton prison. Dr. Edward Reedy, chief medical examiner for the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, conducted the autopsy. His report details injuries consistent with the accounts of Mr. Williams’ final days. “There is evidence of ligature restraint on the decedent’s ankles and contusions on various locations that are also suggestive of manual restraint,” Reedy wrote in the report. He also noted “multiple abrasions and contusions in varying states of healing” and “diffuse abrasions and contusions on his upper extremities that may be defensive in nature.”

“The cause of death was probable asphyxia due to smothering,” Reedy wrote.

Daniel Terry Williams, 22, was likely smothered to death on November 7, 2022 inside Staton Correctional Facility. No one was charged in his death.

Appleseed obtained Lamont Wilson’s full ADOC Classification Summary which documents nine reports of Mr. Wilson sexually assaulting other incarcerated men between 2017 and 2022. Some of the reported assaults also involved additional violence, including stabbing. The reported assaults occurred at Donaldson, Fountain, Ventress, Bullock and Limestone correctional facilities. Mr. Wilson received no disciplinary reports for any of those reported sexual assaults, according to the classification records.

ADOC’s own Classification Summary for Mr. Wilson in 2023 also listed reports against him during the previous 18 months for selling drugs and threatening someone who owed him money with violence, placing a “hit” on another inmate, sexually assaulting an inmate at Donaldson and raping an inmate at Fountain. Yet a risk assessment conducted Oct. 13, 2023, gave Mr. Wilson a score of zero in the category “History of Institutional Violence” during the previous five years. He also received a zero under “Most Severe Disciplinary Report Received.”

On Nov. 8, 2023, while Mr. Williams was on life support for injuries suffered in Mr. Wilson’s cell, ADOC staff completed Mr. Wilson’s annual classification review. The review noted that Mr. Wilson had not received a disciplinary report since 2018 and recommended no changes to his medium-security status.
Mr. Williams died the following day.

An Elmore County grand jury reviewed the evidence against Mr. Wilson in October 2024 but declined to indict him in Mr. Williams’ death. It’s unclear what exact evidence that grand jury saw and heard, because grand jury proceedings are not publicly held, but it has been widely known for years that more cameras are needed throughout the state’s prisons. Even so, ADOC has failed to install and maintain enough cameras to adequately monitor what happens inside its facilities.

In a recent filing in the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit against Alabama and ADOC documenting unconstitutional violence, sexual assault, and excessive force in the state’s prisons for men, federal attorneys included as exhibits 20 “Sexual Abuse Incident Form” documents compiled by ADOC officers in 2022 and 2023. In each of those documents, ADOC officers indicated that additional cameras were needed. Under the question, “Should monitoring technology be deployed or augmented to supplement supervision by staff,” officers wrote responses including “More cameras,” “More cameras would be better,” “more cameras & longer time retention of video footage,” “cameras would have assisted” and “Always need more cameras.”

Despite all of the evidence that Mr. Wilson requires a higher level of custody, it’s unclear whether that would matter, because ADOC seems unable to control the movement of incarcerated people inside prisons, and rules regarding where a person is assigned to sleep, or remain while awake, are not regularly enforced, according to federal attorneys in the DOJ’s lawsuit.

A plea for help hangs inside a cell at Holman Correctional Facility during a media tour.

Then-Commissioner John Hamm minimized unauthorized prisoner movement, testifying in that ongoing federal case ‘Well, you go visit other people at their house, and I mean, you’re not there with malicious intent, then everything is fine, you go back to your house. So if an inmate in a dorm goes to another dorm and just going to say hi, that’s fine, but they are inmates.’”

For the family of Mr. Williams, and now for two other men at Holman, the consequences of what happens when prison officials fail to adequately monitor and respond to violence remain painfully real. As is the case in much of the suffering and violence that occurs in Alabama prisons, officials at ADOC, the largest law enforcement agency in the state, have released no information about these attacks.

Since 2024, Appleseed has called for independent oversight and monitoring of Alabama prisons. Finally, in 2026, the state established a pilot program in which the Office of Examiners of Public Accounts is conducting oversight operations for one prison, which has not yet been named.