COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — A 30-year-old man was sentenced on Wednesday to 20 years in prison for arranging to kill a prison guard who was known for cracking down on contraband inside a prison.
Sean Echols, of Orangeburg, South Carolina, was belligerent when he entered the courtroom, according to officials.
While being lead from the courtroom after the sentencing, Echols, who was handcuffed, struggled with officers and yelled obscenities, officials said.
In April, Echols plead guilty to conspiracy to use interstate facilities in murder-for-hire.
Echols’s sentence will run after he finishes serving 15 years on an unrelated state charges.
Prison Capt. Robert Johnson was shot six times outside his Sumter home in 2010.
The evidence showed the following, according to authorities:
- During the early morning hours of March 5, 2010, Robert Johnson, then a Captain with the South Carolina Department of Corrections, was confronted in his home by an armed gunman, who shot him numerous times in the chest, leaving him for dead.
- Captain Johnson, who has since retired, has undergone seventeen surgeries as a result of this shooting and is still under a doctor’s care.
- The investigation, which is still ongoing, has revealed that the shooting was done in retaliation as a direct result of Captain Johnson’s enforcement of contraband rules in the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
- Captain Johnson had foiled a number of shipments of contraband like drugs and cell phones into the state prison and some of the inmates were unhappy about that.
- The investigation revealed that earlier in 2010, a plot was hatched among certain inmates to retaliate against Captain Johnson, so that the shipments of contraband into the prison would not be disrupted.
- Interviews determined that one specific inmate was a person of interest in the plot.
- A shakedown of the prison revealed a cellular phone belonging to and used by that specific inmate.
- Cell records connected that inmate to another recently released inmate, Sean Echols.
- Through interviews, agents learned that Echols, had communicated through cell phones with the inmate and discussed the plot to kill Captain Johnson, specifying how to carry out the shooting, what Echols would receive in exchange for his role in the plot.
- After the discussions, that inmate then mailed an initial payment to Echols for his role in the murder-for-hire conspiracy.
- Thus, Echols and his co-conspirators used both cellular phones and the mail in this murder-for-hire plot, both of which are facilities of interstate commerce.
Echols is currently serving a fifteen year state sentence stemming from unrelated armed robbery/assault and battery 1st degree convictions in Orangeburg.
He has has prior state convictions for burglary 2nd degree of a dwelling, assault and battery with intent to kill, threatening life of public employee, armed robbery, and assault and battery 1st degree.