He was being transferred to the Jester IV Unit in Richmond, which handles all levels of prisoners needing psychiatric treatment.
Two prison guards approached Tabler’s cell at about 2:30 p.m. and found a sheet over its window.
Tabler was ordered to remove the sheet.
When he did officers noticed a ripped 3-foot section of bedsheet tied to a light fixture and red marks on Tabler’s neck.
Guards restrained him and escorted him to a medical unit for evaluation. No serious injuries were reported, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials.
Tabler is at the center of an investigation into the use of cell phones by death row inmates. The investigation has led to a lockdown of the entire prison system in Texas.
The investigation also led to a second arrest Wednesday, this one in Killeen.
The sister of death row inmate Richard Tabler, Kristina Martinez, turned herself in at the Killeen Police Department at about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.
She was later released on $10,000 bail.
Prison officials confiscated a cell phone from Tabler on Monday. He and 10 other inmates had used it to place some 2,800 calls in 30 days.
An investigation into cell phones on death row started on Oct. 8 after Tabler contacted state Sen. John Whitmire complaining about conditions on death row.
Whitmire said Tuesday that he was determined to rid the state’s prisons of cell phones, starting with death row.
The latest find for prison authorities searching death row was a phone and a charger found in the ceiling of a shower area at the Polunsky Unit, outside Livingston.
The system-wide lockdown has involved searches at all Texas prisons yielding 13 more cell phones and 12 chargers.
Tabler’s mother, Lorraine Tabler, was arrested Monday as she arrived in Texas from Georgia with Tabler’s 84-year-old grandmother. The pair planned to visit Tabler on death row today.
Instead, Mrs. Tabler is in jail on felony charges of providing a prohibited item in a corrections facility. Mrs. Martinez was arrested on the same charge Wednesday on a warrant issued in Polk County that also named her mother.
Tabler was sentenced to death in April 2007 in Bell County for the Nov. 26, 2004, murders of Teazers Gentlemen’s Club owner Mohamed-Amine Rahmouni, 25, and his friend Haitham Zayed, 28, whose bodies were found just outside Killeen.
Tabler and Timothy Payne were charged in connection with those murders and with the Nov. 28, 2004, murders of Teazer’s dancer Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amber Benefield, 16, whose bodies were found just south of Highway 190.
