Was Ex-KISS Guitarist MARK ST. JOHN A Victim Of Brutal Jailhouse Justice?
April 18, 2008, 16 years ago
The following report is courtesy of Orange County Weekly:
A month before roughly two dozen inmates at Theo Lacy Jail viciously killed John Chamberlain in an attack that would earn national headlines and lead to a major scandal that continues to unfold, an inmate named Mark Leslie Norton told deputies he feared for his life. He asked to be moved from one part of the jail to another.
Although deputies may not have recognized him, Norton is better known to most of the world by his stage name, MARK ST. JOHN; he had briefly been a guitarist for the world-famous rock band KISS in the mid-’80s until a nasty bout of arthritis forced him into early retirement.
Norton, according to published reports, grew up in Garden Grove and had been living with his parents there while earning a modest income giving guitar lessons. He was booked into Theo Lacy on Sept. 14, 2006 to serve a two-week sentence after pleading guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia, resisting arrest and attempted destruction of evidence. For a week, Norton stayed in D Barracks, a medium-security dormitory for nonviolent offenders. But on Sept. 21, according to Norton’s inmate file, which the Weekly recently obtained from the sheriff’s department, he told deputies he wanted to be moved somewhere else because he "stole crackers out of another inmate’s property box" and was "in fear for his safety."
Read more at KISSAsylum.com here.
