Abingdon Man Sentenced For Strangling Deaf, Mute Cellmate While In Jail For Other Incident

HARFORD COUNTY, MD — Investigators are digging deeper to determine if a Harford County man convicted of killing a Baltimore homeless man with a hatchet then strangling his deaf and mute cellmate after being booked for the incident can be linked to other homicides.

Gordon Staron, 35, of Abingdon was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole after prosecutors proved that he strangled his cellmate to death. Javarick Gantt, 34, used sign language to communicate and was being held at Central Booking for a failure-to-appear violation stemming from minor assault charges. Andrew G. Slutkin, an attorney for Gantt’s family, told the Baltimore Banner that corrections officials had wrongly scored Staron and Gantt the same in a risk assessment.

State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said he questioned how long it took for corrections officers to discover that Gantt had been attacked. Rigor mortis had set in by the time he was found, a process that Bates said takes six to eight hours to occur, according to the Associated Press.

Staron had been in jail in connection to the killing of Keith Bell, 63. Bell was sitting at a bus stop bench in the 1400 block of East Monument Street in the early morning hours of Sept. 6, 2022, when Staron attacked him with a hatchet. When Harford County Sheriff’s deputies served a DNA warrant on Staron two days after the attack, he came out of the house with a shotgun and knife but was taken into custody without incident, the Baltimore Banner reported.

Bates said after the sentencing that are investigators are looking into whether Staron may be involved in other killings.

Read more at the Associated Press