Benjamin L. Davis, Rot in Hell!

Despite the commonality of a name with two Black military heroes, he was no hero nor a soldier. He was just a racist chump who lived and died like one.

Benjamin L. Davis, the reputed head of the white supremacist prison gang 211 Crew who was serving a 106-year sentence for various crimes including racketeering and is believed to have ordered the 2013 murder of a Colorado Department of Corrections head, was found dead in his cell last month in what authorities are investigating as a suicide.

According to news reports, Davis, 42, was found in his cell on Aug. 28 at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, WY where despite his crimes being committed in Colorado, he was serving under an Interstate Corrections Compact Agreement which allows high-risk inmates to be transferred between states. The manner of death has not been released to the public, but an autopsy has been ordered, according to a news release by Mark Fairbairn, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Corrections.

The 211 Crew, which is not associated with the multiracial neo-Fascist group 211 Boot Boys on the East Coast, was founded in 1995 by Davis, who at the time was serving a 30-year-sentence for robbery and first degree assault, after he reportedly was beaten and nearly killed by a Black inmate. Over the next two decades, they would be implicated in a series of prison assaults and murders, including the 1997 murder of African immigrant Oumar Dia while he was waiting for a bus in Denver, and Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections, outside his home. 211 member and parolee Even Spencer Ebel, who fled to Texas where police shot and killed him in a gunfight, was ordered by Davis to kill Clements, according to investigative documents from Texas Rangers. Crew member Jeremiah Barnum was convicted of Dia’s murder and served a 12-year sentence, being released from prison in 2009, only to be gunned down by police three years later in an armed confrontation with police in a Walgreens’ parking lot.

In 2007, Davis was convicted of racketeering, which gave him an additional 108 years in prison. “The long and short of it Mr. Davis is you don’t need to be on the streets in 40 or 50 years,” District Judge William Robbins said to him in 2013 when he reaffirmed Davis’ sentence, who wanted it to run concurrently. “Your prison sentence was supposed to rehabilitate the defendant. It apparently failed miserably.”