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UTAH STATE PRISON — The death of a Utah State Prison inmate following a fight with another inmate has been ruled a homicide by the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office.
Christopher Lee Lucas, 25, and another inmate got into a fight in a commons area of the Uinta III facility on Sept. 13. Corrections officers used pepper spray to break up the fight. As they were taking Lucas out of the area, he collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he later died.
On Wednesday, Department of Corrections officials released information from the autopsy. Corrections spokeswoman Brooke Adams said the manner of death was ruled a homicide.
Neither the Department of Corrections nor Unified police would release the name of the other man involved in the fight.
The cause of death, Adams said, was "cardiopulmonary arrest following a physical altercation and pepper spray exposure."
Investigations into the incident were still being conducted Wednesday by the department's Law Enforcement Bureau and the Unified Police Department.
Four corrections officers involved were initially placed on standard administrative leave. They were allowed to return to work after two weeks when an internal investigation determined that the use of force was appropriate to stop the fight, Adams said.
Lucas was serving a one-to-15-year sentence for pleading guilty but mentally ill to forcible sexual abuse. He had been at the prison since June 19, 2009, and was scheduled to appear before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on Jan. 1, 2015.
Since being incarcerated, state court records show Lucas was convicted in both 2010 and 2011 of damaging a prison cell. In the 2011 incident, he was convicted after he and another inmate broke a sprinkler head off of a fire suppression system and flooded a section of the Olympus facility.
In 2012, Lucas was convicted of assaulting another inmate after punching a man about 20 times, breaking his eye socket.
