LAKE COUNTY, FLA. – A jury Friday convicted a state prison inmate of manslaughter with a weapon following an argument with a fellow inmate over a few dollars’ worth of canteen items.
Antonio Carter, 51, was a prisoner at Lake Correctional Institution on June 8, 2017, when he pulled out a concealed homemade knife and struck 26-year-old Adonis Boone in the chest.
“I hope I killed him! Io tried to kill him,” Carter said, according to a corrections officer who rushed to the dormitory.
It happened so fast, some witnesses thought he had merely struck Boone in the chest with his fist.
Carter had been charged with second-degree murder. He told Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators that Boone was telling his friend to retrieve a knife from his footlocker.
The argument was about a $30 or $25 debt. Carter and a friend tried to pay half, telling Boone that the canteen would not allow them to withdraw any more at that time from their credit-card type ration card. Carter later told a corrections officer that Boone and his friends were trying to extort him, and that he felt threatened.
The case sheds some light on life — and death — behind the walls of the prison packed with men boiling with rage, including some with nothing to lose because they are already serving what amounts to life behind bars.
Carter, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2007 for carjacking with a deadly weapon, is such a man.
Boone, on the other hand, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013 for being an accomplice in a Tampa bank robbery.
Circuit Judge Cary Rada sentenced Carter to 30 consecutive years in prison.
Witnesses said they heard loud arguing inside Dormitory A, then they saw Carter with a bloody “fire,” or homemade knife in his hand.
“I told him to leave me alone! He kept messing with me!” Carter reportedly said.
Prisoners said Boone ran and climbed a divider wall to get away. Carter followed with knife in hand.
“This is my life; this is what I live!” Carter shouted, according to one prisoner. He also shouted that he was not afraid of anyone.
Guards described the knife as about eight inches long with tape or cloth wrapped around the end to form a handle. It was fashioned from a piece of fence. Guards found another homemade knife in Boone’s locker.
Making knives in prison is common. In 1998, Allen Cox made one out of a welding rod and stabbed a prisoner to death, saying he had stolen $500 cash he earned selling drugs. Already serving a life sentence, he was sentenced to die at the hands of an executioner.
Cash, cell phones and knifes, of course, are contraband, but they are smuggled in by visitors or tossed over the fence.
“Whether you are out in the general public or confined in the general population of a correctional facility, the same laws apply,” said Walter Forgie, Chief State Attorney.