Attack On CIM Guard Revives Chino Valley’s Death Row Inmate Transfer Misgivings

The resourceful though unsuccessful attempt on the life of a correctional officer by an inmate at the California Institution for Men in Chino has revived concerns about security issues involving the influx of Death Row inmates at the facility.
At roughly 8:30 p.m. on Sunday evening August 11, 2024, Kevin G. Roby, 60, clad only in boxer shorts, exited his housing unit and was observed by penal officers shortly thereafter.
Prison guards shouted orders at Roby to return to his housing unit as he began to walk toward the main prison yard. Roby continued and when several officers approached him and employed chemical mace in an effort to restrain him, he used a “shank,” a metal blade he or someone else had fashioned in one of the prison’s workshops which he had pulled from his underwear, to stab one of the guards in the side of his head, opening up a four-inch gash, but failing to reach the victim’s jugular vein or carotid artery.
There were contradictory reports about the action Roby had engaged in. In one account, it was related that the convict had used the element of surprise in wielding the makeshift knife. In another version it was put forth that he had armed himself with the knife and had it in his hand while he was yet heading toward the prison yard and had issued warnings that he would kill anyone in the yard well before a Code I response was ordered and several of the corrections officers formed a skirmish line in order to close in on him in a methodical fashion. Another variation held that Roby had bolted toward the line of correction officers, managing to stab a single guard before he was swarmed by at least six others.
Ultimately, after Roby was subdued and placed in multiple restraints and the wounded officer was taken away to Kaiser Hospital in Ontario for emergency treatment, a decision was made to remove Roby from the California Institution for Men to a facility with a higher order of security.
Roby’s history of vicious criminality beyond that of typical prisoners, his presence in Chino and a general air of agitation in the Chino community about the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s placement of murderers into the Chino Prison population beginning earlier this year has intensified concerns bordering on paranoia in 93,806-population Chino and its surrounding communities.
In 1982, Roby, then 18, wangled an appointment to the Air Force Academy but washed out after less than a year. By 1985, he was back on the streets of Los Angeles, living out of his mother’s home on West 37th Street, becoming involved in more and more serious criminal activity and exhibiting signs of mental illness, having developed a fascination, akin to an obsession, with the infamous Night Stalker case and Satanism in general.
During the next year-and-a-half, he would rape two of his sisters. In January 1987, one of those sisters, Velmalin Hill, then 25, mysteriously disappeared. When the Los Angeles Police came to investigate, Roby told detectives that he had seen three figures dressed in Japanese Ninja garb he believed were men seize his sister. After an effort to trace down what turned out to be bogus leads Roby had provided, the investigators returned to his mother’s home, requesting that Roby lead them through a reenactment of the kidnapping of his sister. As Roby did so, detectives discovered his sister’s body in an oversized trash can covered with dog food.
Roby was arrested and eventually charged with first degree murder and the rape of Velmalin Hill and the rape of another sister. In May 1988, after a bench trial before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert Altman in which Altman by Roby’s consent served as the arbiter and jury, he was convicted of all three charges, with the rape charges including an allegation, deemed true after trial, that he had employed force or violence in perpetrating the sexual assaults on his own sisters. He was given a further enhancement for the use of a firearm in the commission of the crime. Altman sentenced Roby to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Roby was housed at different institutions among the facilities operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation during his 36 years of incarceration. Records show that he began his first stint at the California Institution for Institution for Men on August 24, 1988. At several points he was relegated to some of the California Prison system’s most secure facilities. At various times, Roby insisted that he was an avowed Satanist, and he issued demands that he not be housed with any individuals who espoused Christianity.
While he was at Pelican Bay, a supermax security facility in Crescent City just south of the Oregon border in 2005, the then 41-year-old Roby murdered his cellmate, 36-year-old one-time actor Lloyd Fernandez Avery II, who had parts in the movies Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, Don’t Be a Menace, The Breaks and Shot, playing convincing gang members. Avery, who lived in South Los Angeles, in real life became affiliated with and then joined the Bloods, an infamous street gang, for which he served as a type of enforcer. In July 1998, while seeking to collect a drug debt, he killed Annette Lewis and Percy Branch and was arrested for that crime in December, 1999. He was convicted of double murder, for which he was given a life sentence in December 2000. While in prison, Avery maintained that he had come to recognized the error of his ways and had accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. He thereafter became messianic, seeking to spread the good word of the Gospel and convert others. Avery was referred to as “Baby Jesus” by other inmates.
The placement of Avery in the same cell at Pelican Bay with Roby, who had taken to signing his name as “Satanic Christ” did not work out well. On September 4, 2005, Roby strangled Avery in what authorities say was a ritualized killing, which Roby said he intended as “a warning to God.”
Years later, in a presentation about Avery that was broadcast on the Criminal Perspective podcast in 2020, Roby explained what had led to Avery’s demise. “He was pushing his agenda to convert me to Christianity, which led to us fighting,” Roby said.
In keeping with his belief that “The intentional killing of another person is wrong” and that “Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure,” having “discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation,” Governor Gavin Newsom, upon coming into office after his 2018 election, at once imposed a moratorium on executions and pursued the dismantling of the state’s two Death Rows – the inner high-security portion of San Quentin where 650 condemned men were housed and the housing unit within the Chowchilla Prison where the 21 women consigned to death have been kept. In January 2020, at the time of his one-year anniversary as governor, Newsom and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation initiated a pilot plan which involved transferring 104 inmates off of Death Row to other high-security prisons over a two-year period.
Earlier this year, declaring the pilot program a success, Newsom and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved to permanentize and expand the program, moving more and more Death Row prisoners to other facilities throughout the state.
By April of this year, 39 inmates from Death Row at San Quentin had been transferred to Chino. That triggered intense protests from Chino municipal officials and community members, who three and four months ago were demanding that Newsom and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation relocate the 39 former Death Row out of the Chino Institution for Men and that any planned future importation of condemned men there be rescinded.
The Chino Valley community has grounds to be as or even more concerned about the condemned prisoner transfer program than others living in proximity to state prisons which are absorbing the former Death Row inhabitants. The prison was hurriedly constructed in 1941 to less than exacting standards than many other California prisons because it initially was not intended to house the most violent of the state’s inmates. It was later augmented with improvements to its perimeter fence, including topping it with razor wire, but prisoners seeking to escape in the 1960s were able to, and occasionally did, defeat that obstacle by throwing the thick woolen blankets used on the prison’s beds over the razor wire and climbing atop the barrier to reach the outer side.
In one of the more infamous incidents in local history, in June 1983, Kevin Cooper, at that time serving a sentence on burglary convictions in Los Angeles County, was able to easily walk away from the California Institution for Men, heading roughly 4.5 miles due west, where he holed up in what he thought was an unoccupied residence immediately proximate – some 450 feet away from – the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen, who lived on an equestrian ranch in what was then rural and unincorporated Chino Hills. On the night of June 4/early morning of June 5, 1983, Cooper attacked the Ryens, using a hatchet and knife to kill them, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Christopher Hughes, 11, a family friend who was spending the night. He slashed the throat of the Ryens’ son, Joshua, 8, who survived the ordeal.
After the Cooper escape, state prison officials made what they said were multiple and redundant security improvements that they confidently maintained made escape from the facility unlikely. Specifically, the addition of electrification to one of the perimeter fences, more razor wire atop the other fence, multiple but relatively primitive guard towers, motion detectors, intensive nighttime illumination that creates a 175-yard gauntlet through which a would-be escapee must pass underneath the eyes of constantly vigilant nocturnal personnel before reaching the electrified perimeter, constant motorized patrols near the perimeter and siren signals effectively deter breakout attempts, the prison’s operators insisted.
Nevertheless, there have been constant and recurring breakdowns in the electrical circuitry for the sirens, motion detectors and fence which officials have been loath to admit. Over the years, holes in the perimeter fence which have not been addressed in a timely manner have been observed. In 2018, Michael Garrett escaped from the prison, after which it was revealed that the motion detector on the fence had been inoperable for five years. There have been multiple reports over the years, some perhaps apocryphal, of Chino inmates exiting the institution’s housing after lights out, escaping into nearby Chino for a night of drinking, carousing with prostitutes and engaging in other revelry before returning to the prison and their sleeping quarters before dawn.
The prison houses more than 2,240 minimum-security, medium-security, and maximum-security inmates within a complex consisting of four facilities on a 2,500-acre on a campus that extends from Central Avenue on the west, El Prado Road on the southwest, lying generally south of Eucalyptus Avenue, bordered on the east by the westernmost extension of the now shuttered Heman J. Stark Youth Correctional Facility which fronts to the east on Euclid Avenue. Acting Chino Institution for Men Warden Travis Pennington and officials with the California Department of Corrections, in response to the Chino Valley community’s protests, offered assurances that the internal security measures at the prison keep the more dangerous prisoners it holds separated from the rest of the population. The maximum-security inmates, prison officials said, were in a secured section of the prison from which they could not escape nor have access to the minimum-security or medium-security prisoners.
In the aftermath of the August 11 incident with Roby, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which normally does not provide information with regard to the movement of inmates within the correctional system, on August 12 whisked Roby off to Salinas Valley State Prison, which is adjacent to Soledad State Prison and Training Facility. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Inspector General Amarik K. Singh and his chief deputy, Neil Robertson, were tasked to make a full examination of the Roby matter and its implication.
Prison officials made a referral to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, which as of this week had no report relating to the incident to function from, as the Chino Police Department was not involved in the response to Roby’s action nor called in to carry out an investigation into what had occurred.

San Bernardino County officials are retreating from the commitment they made 11 years ago to open public access to their decision-making process and will do away with their desert videoconferencing sites.
Those residents in the Victor Valley and in the Morongo Valley will now have to sojourn, like all other county residents, to the county seat in order to take part in board of supervisors and county planning commission meetings and hearings.
Beginning in 2013, the county sponsored use of conference rooms at the Jerry Lewis High Desert Government Center in Hesperia and the Bob Burke Government Center in Joshua Tree, at which those present could watch and hear the board and commission proceedings taking place in the Robert Covington meeting room at the County Administrative Building in San Bernardino and from which, by video hook-up, those within the board/commission meeting chamber in San Bernardino could see and hear the desert residents with regard to their input during hearings.
Generally, though not exclusively, those speaking from the desert locations were being heard with regard to issues of import or impact to the community in which they resided.
San Bernardino County covers an expanse of 20,105 square miles, a land area larger than New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. The one-way driving distance from Needles to San Bernardino is 213 miles. The one-way driving distance from Twentynine Palms to San Bernardino is 89 miles. The one-way driving distance from Victorville to San Bernardino is 40.5 miles. The one-way driving distance from Barstow to San Bernardino is 71 miles. The one-way driving distance from Trona to San Bernardino is 133 miles.
None of the five members of the board of supervisors in place in 2013 – Robert Lovingood in the First District, Janice Rutherford in the Second District, James Ramos in the Third District, Gary Ovitt in the Fourth District and Josie Gonzales in the Fifth District – is on the board at present. They have been replaced, respectively, by Paul Cook, Jesse Armendarez, Dawn Rowe, Curt Hagman and Joe Baca, Jr.
In a posting to the county’s website titled County right-sizes use of videoconferencing sites dated August 14, an official rationale for discontinuing the remote videoconferencing option was provided.
“In an effort to meet state employment requirements and spend tax dollars more efficiently, board of supervisors meeting videoconference locations in Joshua Tree and Hesperia will be utilized only when significant public use is anticipated,” the posting states. “Videoconferencing centers have been funded and staffed at the Bob Burke Joshua Tree Government Center and the Jerry Lewis High Desert Government Center in Hesperia for every board meeting for close to a decade. Declining and oftentimes zero public utilization led the county administrative office to re-evaluate the operation of the sites and determine that scaling back operations would constitute the wisest use of public resources.”
According to the posting, “In 2022, 58 people visited the two videoconferencing sites over 23 meetings with a cost to the county of $30,771 for staffing. In 2023, 46 people visited the two sites over 23 meetings – including only one who visited the Hesperia site – with a cost to the county of $37,023. So far in 2024, only five people have visited the Joshua Tree site and only one person has visited the Hesperia site over 13 meetings, with a preliminary cost to the county of $13,752. The county has not yet been billed for all of the costs associated with meetings so far this year.”
While the website posting referenced the $30,771 cost for staffing the videoconferencing sites, it did not make clear whether the county would have sustained that personnel cost regardless of whether the teleconferencing sites were in use or not.
The posting gave a further justification for the discontinuation, stating, “Also, the only space available for videoconferencing at the Bob Burke Joshua Tree Government Center has been an employee break room. State law requires employers to provide suitable rest facilities for employees during working hours. Usage of this room as a videoconferencing site for every meeting too often prevented employees from being able to use this space in accordance with the law.”
The posting stated, “The county will continue to operate the Joshua Tree and/or Hesperia remote participation sites when there is an item on the board agenda that is anticipated to draw significant public participation from those communities. The county is also exploring other potential locations in Joshua Tree to use for these meetings that would ensure alignment with state employment requirements. The public may provide comments to the board of supervisors by submitting written communication via email at BoardMeetingComments@cob.sbcounty.gov, online at publiccomments.cob.sbcounty.gov or via U.S. Mail to San Bernardino County Clerk of the Board of Supervisors at 385 N. Arrowhead Ave, 2nd Fl, San Bernardino, CA 92415.”