A convicted bank robber accused of attacking a state prison guard and sending him to the hospital Thursday is a Pierce County man who made headlines five years ago when he clandestinely married a former county corrections officer in court.
Jimi James Hamilton, 33, is serving a 14-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2007 to first-degree bank robbery. He now might face an additional charge of custodial assault after allegedly attacking a guard at the Monroe Correctional Complex.
State corrections officials said Hamilton tackled and punched the corrections officer as the guard stood near his post inside a living unit about 10 a.m.
Hamilton was being housed in the complex’s Special Offender Unit, which holds about 350 mentally ill offenders. He has been transferred to the maximum-security unit for now, prison officials said.
“Other correctional officers quickly responded and secured the unit,” the agency said in a statement. “The incident lasted about seven seconds.”
It was before a November 2007 hearing where he pleaded guilty in Pierce County Superior Court that Hamilton and Sara Camarillo, a former probationary employee with Pierce County corrections, were married.
Unknown to corrections officers, who previously forbade an in-jail ceremony for the couple, Hamilton and Camarillo signed a marriage certificate just before Hamilton put his signature to his plea paperwork, authorities said at the time.
Camarillo previously was fired after jail officials discovered she’d been having a relationship with Hamilton while she worked in the jail and he awaited trial.
Hamilton was a troublesome inmate while housed in the Pierce County Jail, accused of throwing feces and urine, destroying property and assaulting a guard. Some of those acts generated criminal counts that were dismissed as part of his robbery plea bargain.
adam.lynn@thenewstribune.com 253-597-8644
blog.thenewstribune.com/crime
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