Courtesy photos. Corrections officer Donna Fitzgerald was murdered by an inmate at Tomoka prison -- stabbed 25 times on June 25 while she was working alone in a section of the prison with 13 inmates. Enoch Hall, a lifer, is charged with capital murder and faces the death penalty, if convicted at trial.
DAYTONA BEACH -- Corrections officer Donna Fitzgerald was a single mother working extra hours at the Tomoka Correctional Institute when she was savagely attacked the night of June 25 -- stabbed 25 times to death by an inmate already serving two life sentences, according to authorities.
She was 50 and left behind a 20-year-old son in Port Orange.
Enoch Hall, 39, used a make-shift knife from a piece of sheet-metal in the surprise attack on the officer while hiding in a shed, according to authorities. She was all alone. She was not armed and had gone looking for him.
Hall was sentenced to life sentence in Escambia County in 1993, for kidnapping and raping a 66-year-old woman. The previous year, he was convicted of attacking another woman and taking her against her will to Alabama.
According to a prison report, Fitzgerald was assigned alone to watch over 13 inmates, including Hall, five of them rapists, seven killers and the last, a robber. She had no weapons and for some unknown reason, didn't have her radio with her when she went looking for Hall.
Her semi-nude body was discovered shortly after the 7:30 p.m. slumped over a cart with half the stab wounds to her back.
Hall later pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. The state is seeking the death penalty in an indictment handed up in circuit court by a Volusia County grand jury.
Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walter McNeil said in a press release of the killing: "Words cannot express the sorrow I feel over the loss of our correctional officer. The entire department grieves the murder of one of our finest officers, and we pray for the victim's family during this difficult time."
Fitzgerald, a corrections officer for 13 years, was the first female killed at Tomoka on Tiger Bay Road in Daytona Beach, and only the second in the state's history.