ALBANY – A high prison official and a guard at Green Haven Correctional Facility were stabbed yesterday in a vicious sneak attack by a lifer convicted of two gruesome murders, including the notorious 1993 slaying of a Manhattan graphic artist.
The violence happened at the maximum-security prison in Dutchess County in front of 360 other inmates in the exercise yard, state correction officials said.
Tyrone Walker, 31, used two homemade knives, each six to eight inches long, during the rampage, officials said.
Walker was sentenced to life in prison, without parole, for the Feb. 18, 1993, murder of an Ulster County drug dealer – just five days before Walker and accomplice Eric Rogers fatally shot TriBeCa graphic artist Bonnie Bear.
The 42-year-old Bear, accosted while she was unloading packages from her car, resisted a robbery attempt and was shot in the neck. Afterward, Walker and Rogers grabbed the packages and ran off laughing.
The pair were busted hours later while trying to rob an elderly man in Coney Island.
“I’m putting you some place where you won’t kill again, which I’m sure you’d do if you ever got back on the street,” Judge Thomas J. McAvoy said to a smirking Walker at his sentencing for the upstate drug dealer’s death. He was later sentenced to 32½ years to life for Bear’s murder and the Coney Island robbery attempt.
In the prison attack, Deputy Superintendent George Schneider was making his normal rounds when Walker, holding the knives in each hand, called his name and suddenly attacked him, officials said.
Walker then stabbed one of the two guards trying to subdue him, officials said.
Schneider was hospitalized with puncture wounds to the back, shoulder and above the right eye, as well as a broken nose. The guard was treated and released.