Man pleads guilty to beating Lansing prison guard, causing traumatic brain injury

A Kansas inmate who attacked a prison guard and caused a traumatic brain injury pleaded guilty to aggravated battery, the Leavenworth County attorney announced Thursday.

Ron L. Larsen, Jr. a 37-year-old inmate in the Lansing Correctional Facility, was convicted Friday of aggravated battery and trafficking contraband in a correctional facility after he attacked a female prison guard in November 2021, Leavenworth County Attorney Todd Thompson said in a news release.

Larsen will be sentenced on Nov. 30.

When Larsen was serving a sentence in the Lansing Correctional Facility for kidnapping, aggravated burglary and theft in Johnson County, he came behind a prison guard and punched her in the head until she was unconscious and fell to the floor, Thompson said.

Larson kept striking the woman in the head while she was on the ground, causing multiple fractures to her face and ribs and causing a traumatic brain injury, Thompson said. Two other inmates pulled Larsen off of the woman. A plastic bag containing methamphetamine was later found concealed in Larsen’s belly button.

The officer was hospitalized and continues to undergo rehabilitation, Thompson said.

“All people should expect to go to work and be safe, this includes our law enforcement and correction officers,” Thompson said in the news release. “We are grateful to those who have jobs that put their well-being at risk, and we need to protect them.”

The attack was the first of two at Lansing Correctional Facility in November 2021. Both times, inmates assaulted prison guards, officials said.

At the time, Sarah LaFrenz, president of the Kansas Organization of State Employees which represents the prison guards, said understaffing in the prison led to safety problems in which one or two officers were assigned to monitor areas that hold several hundred inmates. There were 73 uniformed vacancies at the prison on Nov. 1, 2021, a few days before the incident.

The female prison guard who was injured was assigned an area that holds 127 inmates, LaFrenz said.

“There’s one person there,” LaFrenz said. “So when someone attacked her, there was no one to call. There’s no one else to see that.”

LaFrenz said the situation at the prison has improved, but changes still need to be made. While the vacancy numbers have risen to 86 as of Oct. 3, LaFrenz said the prison has alleviated some of the burden on officers by lowering the number of inmates, moving beds around and placing higher risk inmates in other facilities.

The situation may also have improved a bit because of veteran officers returning to the job and COVID-19 posing a lower risk than it has in recent years, she said.

LaFrenz said she believes the Department of Corrections and Gov. Laura Kelly are taking the issue seriously, but she emphasized the importance of filling the roles.

“It’s going to continue to be dangerous if it’s understaffed,” LaFrenz said. “And all these people are still working 12 hours shifts.”

It will be harder to fill the open positions, LaFrenz said, because the job market is more competitive than it was six months ago and hiring managers are looking to fill specialized roles.

“Not everyone is willing or able to work in a correctional facility,” she said.