SANTA ANA (CNS) - A 19-year-old convicted killer, who has escaped custody twice, pleaded not guilty Thursday to making a shank while in jail.
Ike Souzer was indicted on single felony counts each of possession of a deadly weapon by a prisoner and a prisoner manufacturing a deadly weapon. He was ordered to return to court Feb. 3 for a pretrial hearing in the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana.
Souzer could face up to four years and eight months in prison if convicted of the charges at trial. He made headlines in April when he freed himself of his electronic monitoring device and escaped custody in a halfway house in Santa Ana.
Souzer was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for stabbing his mother to death in 2017, when he was 13 years old, by Orange County Superior Court Judge Douglas J. Hatchimonji and while in custody, he was convicted last December of attacking three correctional officers, according to prosecutors.
He was ordered to wear an electronic monitor for the remainder of his sentence until it expired on July 9, 2023, and was released to a halfway house in Santa Ana, prosecutors said.
While on trial in juvenile court for the killing of his 47-year-old mother, Barbara Scheuer-Souzer, he escaped juvenile hall in Orange shortly after midnight April 12, 2019, and was arrested the next day at a McDonald's restaurant in Anaheim.
Souzer stabbed his mother in their residence in the 11000 block of Gilbert Street in Garden Grove on May 4, 2017. She told authorities before she died in a hospital that her son was the one who attacked her.