| Updated: 5/30/2012 9:26 am |
Published: 4/09/2012 6:11 pm
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A hearing for accused Good Friday gunmen Jacob England and Alvin Watts was delayed Wednesday.
The preliminary hearing was scheduled to begin at 9am. Prosecutors pushed for a delay, because they are waiting on documents from the medical examiner's office.
Their next court date is scheduled for July 18th at 9am.
England and Watts are white men accused of shooting five African American people in north Tulsa, killing three of them. It appears the crimes were racially motivated.
With the high-profile nature of the crimes they're accused of, keeping them safe inside the jail is an issue the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office is dealing with. The sheriff's office runs the jail, and has taken special measures to keep them safe.
When they do get their day in court, special precautions will be taken in transporting England and Watts back and forth between the jail and the courthouse. Both will be transported alone with no other inmates, and there will be extra security around them at all times.
Even though there have been no specific threats against either of them at this point, both are being kept away from other inmates.
"There's televisions in the jail," Sgt. Shannon Clark with the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office said. "And all those inmates are watching those tv segments, and they're seeing [the] newscasts. They know exactly who these guys are. So, we have to keep them isolated away from the general population, where other inmates wouldn't have access to them in case somebody wanted to inflect harm up on them."
Both Watts and England will undergo a psych evaluation inside the jail, and a doctor will determine if they need to be on suicide watch.
Clark said England and Watts are not getting special treatment. He said such treatment is common for high-profile cases, and for other cases in which inmates must be kept separate for safety reasons.
