A Prisoner Had An Affair With A Guard And Was Late...

A Prisoner Had An Affair With A Guard And Was Later Found With His 𝐀𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧 | HO!!!!

A Prisoner Had An Affair With A Guard And Was Later Found With His 𝐀𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧 | HO!!!!

The little US flag decal on the Louisiana State Penitentiary control-room monitor had started to peel at the corners, curling up every time the night air kicked through the vents. It sat just below the camera grid, a red‑white‑and‑blue reminder that this place—better known as Angola—was supposed to be about justice and order, not just concrete, razor wire, and buried secrets. At 5:42 a.m. on May 18, 2021, that control room logged a call that would crack one of those secrets wide open.

“Laundry wing,” the voice on the radio said, tight, breathless. “We got a body.”

By the time the control sergeant zoomed camera feeds and dispatched medical, Senior Officer Harold Trenton was already jogging toward the institutional laundry, boots slapping the polished concrete, badge swinging against his gray shirt.

He knew exactly which door to use.

A correction sergeant reached the laundry first and found inmate Marcus Langston, 28, on the floor near a linen cart, a wide, dark pool spreading around his head and shoulders. The concrete glistened with fresh blood across nearly two square meters. The deep neck wound ran from just under the left mandible all the way to the right clavicle, a single savage incision instead of multiple random cuts.

Within minutes, medical staff rushed in with a crash bag they didn’t really need. At 5:55 a.m., they pronounced Langston dead.

The coroner’s preliminary notes would later list something else, something the sergeant tried not to stare at while he waited for the sheet: additional rectal trauma from a rigid cylindrical object, about three centimeters across. Langston had not just been killed. He’d been brutalized.

On paper, Marcus Langston was supposed to be a small case. Five-year sentence for felony theft out of Orleans Parish, case number 17‑C4512. Prior burglary convictions. Parole violations. Institutional write‑ups for contraband and minor disrespect, but nothing violent.

In Angola’s housing chart, he lived in B‑14, a single bunk in medium custody. On work rosters, he was “maintenance detail,” the guy who fixed vents and lights in the lower tiers, the one officers would borrow when they wanted a bulb changed without calling a full crew.

In officer gossip, he was something else: “slick,” “too charming,” “the one with friends in gray shirts.”

The first question in a prison death is always the same: How did someone get where they shouldn’t have been, without anyone seeing them get there?

When technicians pulled the electronic access logs for the corridor leading to laundry—L2—they found something odd. Four hours before the estimated time of death, the camera system covering that corridor had been turned off.

Not glitched. Not fuzzed out. Manually disabled by an administrative command.

The credential used for that override was badge number TX‑4421.

Senior Officer Harold Trenton, age 43. Employed at the facility since 2001. Night‑shift supervisor.

“Testing the circuit,” he would say later when they asked him why he’d done it.

There was no matching maintenance ticket.

On the surface, Trenton was the kind of veteran CO younger officers copied without even meaning to. He knew every blind spot, every shortcut, every trick inmates used. He also knew which rules could be bent without snapping.

Somewhere along the line, that knowing had become something else.

Langston’s inmate file painted him as manipulative and adaptable. Case managers said he was good at getting things from people. A peek at his property sheet backed that up. He’d been found with an unreported AM/FM radio, confiscated twice, returned within weeks. Snack items and an unopened soda in his locker that didn’t match commissary inventory. Cigarettes that weren’t his tier’s brand.

Someone on the inside was making sure his hands stayed full.

When investigators started talking to other maintenance inmates, a pattern emerged. Langston got more staff time than the others. He worked in staff corridors more often. Escorts got waved off when he was paired with Trenton.

“Trenton trusted him more than us,” a worker named Samuel Reeves said. “Sent the escort away sometimes. Said, ‘I got him.’”

Personnel rosters confirmed that in March 2021, Langston had been assigned to air duct cleaning in the staff hallway that led right past the control office. The supervising officer for that area was Trenton.

Around the same time, internal emails showed Trenton asking that Langston be kept on maintenance “for continuity,” even though rotation policies said inmates should cycle to other jobs.

“We’re just citing the record,” the investigator told the warden later. “It reads like favoritism.”

In early April, Langston got caught with cigarettes again. Policy said write-up and loss of privileges. Instead, the sanction got waived under Trenton’s signature.

Two weeks after that, a random locker inspection turned up a stash of junk food and a still-sealed drink in Langston’s box. No paper trail. No action taken.

Not everyone was okay with it.

Officer Derek Price, age 30, had joined Angola in 2018, the kind of guy who quoted policy numbers in casual conversation. On May 4, 2021, he wrote a memo to his sergeant.

“I am requesting clarification,” he wrote. “Inmate Langston appears to be receiving special access and inconsistent enforcement of rules. This creates a safety concern.”

The memo got acknowledged. Then shelved.

On the tier, inmates noticed the triangulation immediately.

“He got friends in gray shirts,” one worker said. Everyone knew what that meant: uniformed staff. Power.

“He bragged sometimes,” Luther James, a laundry worker, would later testify. “Said he could get things we couldn’t. Said he could be out in half his time if he played his cards right.”

Meanwhile, Price watched. He watched Langston walk extra routes. He watched Trenton wave him through doors other inmates couldn’t touch. He watched contraband audits skirt certain areas.

He also watched his own name fail to show up on any “preferred” lists.

Forensic crews reached the laundry at 7:20 a.m., long after the medics had left but while the blood was still tacky in the cracks of the floor. They photographed everything before they touched it: Langston’s body position, the cart he’d fallen beside, the faint lines of smear marks suggesting someone had tried, briefly, to drag him.

On a supply rack, a box cutter lay where no inmate was supposed to reach it.

Near a dryer, a scrap of torn latex glove clung to the baseboard. In the drain, mop water tinted pink from diluted blood sloshed weakly.

The access control logs showed that between 1:58 and 2:06 a.m., doors to the laundry had opened twice—both with the same credential used to take the cameras offline.

TX‑4421.

Trenton’s badge.

Between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m.—the window when the coroner would later place Langston’s death—only two staff badges registered in or near the laundry.

Trenton’s at 1:58 and 2:04.

Price’s at 2:09.

Both men told investigators they hadn’t been there.

“I was in the control room checking monitors,” Trenton said.

“I was in the kitchen verifying inventory,” Price said.

Control software showed no sensor alerts or kitchen activity during that time.

Lab work moved faster than usual when the results implicated staff.

The glove scrap wedged behind the dryer came back with one DNA profile: Trenton’s.

A partial print on the mop handle had enough ridge detail to line up with Price’s right index finger. Not enough to rule out every other human on earth. Enough to raise eyebrows when combined with badge data.

“You were cleaning a mess you say you never saw,” Detective Evan Russo told Price later.

“Somebody could’ve used my badge,” Price shot back. “You know how it is in here.”

“Sure,” Russo said quietly. “Cameras go off by themselves, doors open with ghost credentials, and mops just jump into people’s hands.”

Then Luther James agreed to talk.

“I heard them arguing,” he said. “Four days before they found him. In the loading bay. Langston shouting, ‘You think you can play me?’ And Trenton saying, ‘Keep your mouth shut.’”

He didn’t see blows, he said. Just heard voices. But it was the first time anyone had placed the veteran officer and the inmate in open conflict.

When they searched Langston’s property, they found letters he’d written but never sent. The handwriting slanted more the angrier he got.

“He owes me,” one page said. “He promised money for silence. I can make his whole world burn.”

Investigators read “money for silence” and thought contraband. Drugs. Phones. Then they checked phone logs from a smuggled device seized in a separate sweep and found calls and texts to a number tucked under a family plan registered to one Mrs. Trenton.

The texts were coded, but the pattern was clear: “packages,” “drops,” “quiet time in Laundry.”

When they widened the lens to staff interviews, Officer Price came up again.

“He complained about corruption in Laundry,” one CO said. “Said he was going to get proof.”

A parking lot camera from two days before the killing caught Trenton and Price in a heated exchange near a silver Ford Taurus. A janitor who’d been sweeping under the overhang said he heard one of them say, “He’s going to ruin everything.”

“He” being Langston.

Contraband audits ramped up in early May. Notes later found in Trenton’s locker read, “clear old lines before check.”

“Lines” meant smuggling routes.

In the same period, Price took over supervision of Laundry.

If this had been a movie, the big break would’ve come from a dramatic confession. In reality, it came from a maintenance crew elbow‑deep in a clogged drain five days after the murder.

“Got something,” one worker called, holding up a splintered wooden piece they’d wrestled from the pipe. It was the tip of a batten—the rounded end of a standard‑issue prison staff baton. The serial number was worn but still legible.

It matched the batten assigned to Officer Derek Price.

Department records showed no incident report about a broken baton. No replacement request. No write‑up.

Under questioning, Price said it had snapped “weeks ago” and he’d forgotten to do the paperwork.

No one else remembered him ever being without his stick.

On May 24, 2021, the Department of Corrections handed the case over to the Louisiana State Police Bureau of Investigations. Internal affairs could handle policy. The state would handle homicide.

They sent in Detectives Russo and Mara Chris. They pulled fiber from the floor, tape from the junction box where the camera line had been cut. The damage to the conduit was clean, straight, consistent with a box cutter blade, not a short or wear‑and‑tear.

Software logs showed an administrator event at 1:56 a.m. on May 18.

Manual override. Camera offline. Rear dryers.

Badge credential: TX‑4421.

The wooden batten shaft they’d already tied to Price now had a second gift: latent prints matching his right hand.

When they put that in front of him, Price’s story shifted.

“Look, I was there,” he admitted. “But he was already bleeding when I got in. Trenton called me. Said, ‘I need help.’ I walked in, saw the mess, and he’s like, ‘We gotta clean this up. Cameras are off.’ I didn’t touch that man. I just mopped.”

“You didn’t ask why the cameras were off?” Russo pressed.

“He’s my supervisor,” Price said. “You do what you’re told on nights. You know that.”

When they pulled Trenton back into the interview room and slid three things across the table—the glove with his DNA, the access log, and a printout of a deleted text they’d recovered from his phone—his face went still.

The text, sent from Trenton’s phone to Price’s number at 11:18 p.m. on May 17, read:

“Handle it tonight before he talks.”

The metadata showed it had pinged off the tower nearest the prison.

“Care to explain this?” Detective Chris asked.

Trenton stared at the paper for a long moment. Then he leaned back.

“I want my lawyer,” he said.

After that, he said nothing.

The evidence was enough to map a rough sequence even without cooperation.

Around midnight, Trenton left the control room, badge logging him through the staff corridor. He went to B‑14, called Langston out for “special work detail.”

“Multiple inmates heard him,” Luther James said under oath later. “They said Trenton told him, ‘Laundry. Now.’ He went with him.”

At 2:03 a.m., door logs showed Langston’s access plus Trenton’s credential entering the laundry section. At 2:06, Price’s badge swiped in.

No other entries until the morning crew found a corpse.

The working theory was ugly: Langston thought he was meeting for another trade—contraband, cash, or the continuation of a relationship he’d turned into leverage. Instead, he walked into a setup.

“They wanted the flash drive,” Russo told the DA later.

That thumb-sized piece of plastic had turned up jammed above the folding table in a ceiling vent weeks later, after inmates whispered about “something he hid up top.”

On it was data Langston had pulled by pairing a contraband phone to a Bluetooth printer in the control office. He’d captured log exports, message threads—receipts of sorts.

Two things on that drive mattered most.

A selfie from Trenton’s phone—both men in frame—in a staff‑only corridor. Not a handshake photo. A close, intimate shot, faces too close to be casual.

And a screenshot of Trenton’s banking app showing three weekend cash deposits: $400, $600, $800. Each deposit lined up with commissary anomalies and recorded contraband surges.

The internal narrative prosecutors would later present was simple: a relationship that started as exploitation and favors, grew into smuggling, and curdled into blackmail.

Langston had realized that in a place like Angola, an officer being intimate with an inmate was career-ending, possibly criminal. Add contraband trafficking, and it was life‑altering. He’d gotten proof. He wanted payment.

Trenton wanted him quiet.

The autopsy findings filled in the violence frame by frame.

Internal injuries showed blunt force trauma consistent with repeated strikes from a round‑ended baton—the same kind Price carried. The pattern of damage and the absence of defensive wounds suggested restraint from behind. The sexual injuries, brutal and clearly intentional, pointed to a weaponized use of that same baton or something like it.

The fatal neck wound was a single, deep cut inflicted while Langston was already on the floor. Blood spatter patterns radiating from the body at floor level proved he’d been down when the cut was delivered.

On May 25, arrest warrants went out for both officers: second‑degree murder, conspiracy, aggravated sexual assault, obstruction of justice. They were booked into different parish jails under segregation.

The story changed again once their cooperation with each other snapped.

“He ordered me,” Price said in a later interrogation. “He said we had to fix it. Said the cameras were taken care of, we’d be in and out. I thought we were going to scare him. Make him hand over the drive. Then he starts swinging.”

“Langston attacked first,” Trenton’s lawyer claimed in a public statement. “My client defended himself in a struggle that got out of hand.”

The lack of any injuries on Trenton, the tied cord on Langston’s wrists, and the medical examiner’s testimony about complete immobilization demolished that argument.

Because they were state employees acting “under color of law,” the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office formed a special task force for the case. They separated witnesses, moved every laundry inmate to different blocks, shut down gossip chains as best they could.

Search warrants hit Trenton’s house. Agents seized his smartphone, two prepaid flips, and a spiral notebook listing inmate names next to dollar amounts—an internal ledger of who owed what for which favor.

In Price’s Ford Taurus, hidden in the spare tire well, they found a roll of black electrical tape. Lab analysis matched its adhesive to the tape used on the severed camera line. Same polymer binder. Same batch.

Digital examiners cracked Trenton’s encrypted messaging app. In message strings with a contact labeled “DP,” they found phrases like “quiet laundry time,” “tools in bin 3,” and, three days before the murder:

“He brings the stick, I bring the blade.”

When Price heard that in court, he dropped his eyes.

Institutional property logs filled in another gap. An April 29 intake ledger listed a confiscated flash drive under Langston’s name, “received” but with no officer signature and no evidence barcode. The supervising shift officer that evening had been Trenton.

The drive later pulled from the laundry vent had no chain of custody gap documented between recovery and imaging. The judge rejected defense attempts to suppress it.

Additional inmate testimony cemented the pattern.

“He’d come out of that staff hall shaking, then later brag like he held the man’s whole life in his hand,” Luther James said about Langston. “Said he could retire early if he pushed the right button.”

Another inmate, Preston Cole, testified that he’d seen Trenton hand Price a boxed set of box cutters from the maintenance cage two nights before the killing. Inventory sheets showed the same set missing, with no dual signature recorded.

Internal affairs brought three old grievances against Price back into the light. Inmates had accused him of “excessive pressure” during pat-downs between May 5 and May 12. None of those had even made it to the warden’s desk.

A nurse from the infirmary added a detail that made the gallery shift in their seats: two months before his death, she’d treated Langston for unexplained rectal bleeding. The escort form bore Trenton’s signature.

“He walked him down,” she said. “Stood by the door, wouldn’t leave. He told me Langston slipped in the shower. Langston wouldn’t look up.”

By the time the grand jury convened in early June, the picture was ugly and detailed.

The indictments: second‑degree murder, aggravated rape, obstruction of justice, malfeasance in office, conspiracy.

Pre‑trial discovery pulled the last curtain back on the contraband network. Trenton’s cousin’s Cash App account showed dozens of small deposits—$200 here, $150 there—each lining up with days inmates under Trenton’s supervision bought more than they should’ve been able to. Smuggled phone logs traced cigarette and pill sales directly to his blocks.

“Whenever we clamped down with audits, Langston’s supplies dried up,” an auditor testified. “When we relaxed, he was back in business. He wasn’t the king. He was the favored middleman.”

The flash drive, with its selfie of Trenton and Langston framed together in a forbidden hallway and its bank screenshots, told the rest.

“He had what he needed to burn them,” the prosecutor told the jury in opening statements months later. “They had what they thought they needed to stop him.”

Trial opened in January 2022 in West Feliciana Parish Court, the US flag hanging behind the judge’s chair, the seal of Louisiana on the wall, twelve people in the box tasked with deciding whether two men who were supposed to uphold the law had turned it into a weapon.

The coroner went first.

“The neck wound,” he said, voice even, “was a single incision, left to right, deep enough to sever both carotid arteries and the trachea. It was consistent with a sharp, narrow blade like a box cutter. The pattern of the cut matched a missing blade holder recovered from the laundry supply rack.”

A forensic tech showed photos of that holder, nicks along the metal edge. Microscopic comparison had matched those burrs to scrape marks on Langston’s jawline. In a separate photo, taken months earlier during a random locker search, the same cutter sat in a plastic bin with “Trenton” taped on the side.

Defense attorneys tried to make the case about Langston’s past.

“He was a thief, a liar,” Trenton’s lawyer said. “He manipulated everyone around him. He threatened good officers doing their jobs.”

“Inmates will say anything for time off their sentence,” Price’s attorney added. “These so‑called witnesses saw an opportunity.”

The prosecutor didn’t bother attacking the inmates’ characters. She didn’t have to.

“DNA doesn’t lie for good time,” she said. “Tape adhesive doesn’t care who you think is charming. Access logs don’t take sides.”

She put the evidence timeline on a screen: the camera override at 1:56 a.m., the door swipes at 2:03 and 2:06, the text “handle it tonight,” the phrase “he brings the stick, I bring the blade.”

Midway through trial, they introduced the selfie.

The grainy picture projected big enough that everyone could see. Trenton and Langston in the same staff corridor, shoulder to shoulder, reflections in a metal door behind them. It was not the kind of photo a by‑the‑book sergeant was supposed to have with an inmate.

“That image is altered,” Trenton said on the stand. “I don’t know how they did it, but that’s not me.”

A digital imaging expert explained metadata to the jury: the file created on Trenton’s phone at 9:47 p.m. on April 9, 2021. No signs of editing. No clones. No cut‑and‑paste artifacts.

“That’s you,” the prosecutor said, without raising her voice. “And that’s him. And that’s a door nobody else is supposed to see from that side.”

Price’s attorney tried to carve out a sliver of mercy for his client.

“He was a subordinate,” he argued. “He was under pressure from a superior who controlled his schedule, his assignments, his future. He thought they were just going to scare Langston. He didn’t know it would go this far.”

The forensic pathologist’s testimony about the internal injuries made that hard to swallow.

“The pattern of trauma,” she said, “shows repeated forceful penetration with a rounded object the approximate size and shape of the batten recovered from Officer Price’s locker. The injuries were not incidental. They were deliberate, repeated, and inflicted while the victim was restrained.”

“This wasn’t ‘scare pressure,’” the prosecutor said later. “This was punishment. This was humiliation by design.”

Investigators from the task force closed the loop by walking the jury through the cover‑up: the mop water with diluted blood, the glove with Trenton’s DNA, the tape in Price’s car matching the cut camera wires, the false alibis.

In closing arguments, the prosecutor stood in front of the jury and pointed, not at the defendants, but at the big screen showing the prison’s camera grid, the little US flag decal still visible in the corner of the frame.

“Those cameras are there for a reason,” she said. “To watch the people in brown jumpsuits and the people in gray shirts. Because when you give someone the state’s power—the power to lock a door, to move a man, to turn a camera off—you have to watch how they use it.”

“On May 18, 2021,” she continued, “these two men turned that power inward. A guard who thought he was untouchable, a younger officer who chose profit and pressure over duty, and a prisoner who thought he had finally found a way to make the people in gray shirts afraid of him.”

She paused.

“Marcus Langston didn’t get a choice about how that story ended,” she said. “You do.”

The defense repeated their lines about manipulation and coercion. They questioned motives. They didn’t have another timeline to offer.

The jury deliberated for nine hours.

When they came back, the courtroom was so quiet you could hear the hum of the ventilation system.

“On the charge of second‑degree murder,” the foreperson read, “we find the defendant, Harold Trenton, guilty.”

“On the charge of second‑degree murder, we find the defendant, Derek Price, guilty.”

Guilty on aggravated rape. Guilty on obstruction. Guilty on malfeasance in office and conspiracy.

Two weeks later, sentencing made it official.

Trenton: life in prison without parole for murder, plus consecutive terms for sexual assault and obstruction.

Price: life for murder, 40 years for the assault, 10 for obstruction, five for malfeasance. The numbers stacked until it hardly mattered how they ran; the life term controlled everything.

Both men left Angola not as officers, but as inmates shipped to separate out‑of‑state high‑security facilities to reduce the odds of becoming targets themselves.

Within days, the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division opened a separate investigation into “color of law” violations at the prison. The warden resigned. The state announced audits of staff‑inmate contact policies, contraband controls, and surveillance oversight.

In the control room at Angola, someone finally peeled the curling flag decal off the monitor and replaced it with a fresh one.

It was still a small thing, a cheap piece of plastic and glue, but to the sergeant who stuck it on, it was a reminder that eyes were now watching the gray shirts as closely as the brown jumpsuits.

Somewhere in a graveyard plot marked only by a number and a year, Marcus Langston’s name didn’t appear on a stone. He’d been a case file, a line in a ledger, another inmate in a system that often saw people as inventory.

In the end, it was his death—and the brutal way power had been exercised over his body—that forced the system to look back at itself.

In a place built on control, that might have been the only way the truth was ever going to get out.