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City prison skirmish leaves 1 inmate dead, 3 hurt

Earl Gene Bostic was a magnet for trouble. Arrested at least 24 times since his 18th birthday, Bostic, 42, again entered the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility - the city prison that had become like a second home to him - on New Year's Day, charged in an armed robbery two days earlier.

Earl Gene Bostic was a magnet for trouble.

Arrested at least 24 times since his 18th birthday, Bostic, 42, again entered the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility - the city prison that had become like a second home to him - on New Year's Day, charged in an armed robbery two days earlier.

And though the repeat violent offender beat most of the cases against him over the past two decades, his luck ran out about 10 Tuesday night, when he lost a skirmish with other inmates and died of stab wounds at Aria Health's Torresdale hospital. He was the first inmate slain in a city prison in more than two years.

Investigators were trying to determine yesterday what sparked the fight between inmates. Two other inmates were hospitalized with serious wounds, and a third was treated in the prison infirmary, prisons spokesman Bob Eskind said.

Eskind and representatives for the Police Department yesterday declined to identify the other inmates involved and whether they would be charged.

They also had no details on what weapons were used, although Eskind confirmed that authorities found and confiscated two weapons immediately after the assault.

Bostic was stabbed all over his body, including in his chest, in the 10 p.m. incident, authorities said. The unit where the confrontation occurred remained on lockdown yesterday afternoon, as corrections officers continued a shakedown to ferret out other weapons or contraband.

Bostic, whose most recent address was Reedland Street near 62nd in Southwest Philadelphia, was set to face trial Oct. 17.

Of 24 adult arrests listed in online court records, only six ended in conviction, including a 1992 aggravated assault case for which Bostic was sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison.

Later in 1992, Bostic was accused of assaulting another prisoner; charges in that case were dismissed, court records show.

Eskind noted that Tuesday's stabbings were unusual for the prison system, which houses about 8,055 inmates, including about 2,900 at Curran-Fromhold.

Assaults and injuries in city prisons have remained fairly flat in recent years; Curran-Fromhold has averaged about 22 inmates involved in fighting with injuries and/or weapons each month for the past year, he added.

The last inmate killed in a city prison was in March 2009 at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, Eskind said.

Tuesday's stabbing prompted Lorenzo North, president of the Prison Guards Union Local 159, to call on prisons officials to hold more shakedowns - and longer, facility-wide lockdowns when contraband is found.

"When you're sleeping, the inmates are thinking," North said. "The prisons are dangerous; stuff like this goes on on a daily basis. It only made the paper this time because somebody got killed. It was four inmates, but it could just as easily been four corrections officers or four social workers."

But Eskind said authorities do frequently hold shakedowns, both randomly and in response to tips of contraband. "We did 32 shakedowns the previous week," he said of Curran-Fromhold. "It's all part of the job."