Tech stabbing suspect transferred to mental facility six months after ruling

In the fall of 2023, Jacoby Johnson allegedly carried out a deadly stabbing spree on Louisiana Tech University campus, killing one Ruston woman and injuring three others.

This spring, the former Tech student was declared mentally unfit to stand trial thanks to a successful appeal. The 3rd Judicial District court ordered Johnson be committed to a forensic hospital for treatment so that eventually he’d be able to return and be tried for murder.

After that order, Johnson spent more than six months as a pre- trial inmate at the Lincoln Parish Detention Center, waiting for a spot to open up at the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System hospital in Jackson.

The wait ended on Dec. 3, and Johnson was transferred from Lincoln Parish to the Forensic Division of the ELMHS.

“We don’t know when he’ll return,” LPDC Warden J.D. Driskill said Friday. “We have no way of knowing.”

It’s up to the psychologists at ELMHS to determine if and when Johnson, who claimed throughout court proceedings earlier this year that he “hears voices” that urge him to harm himself and others, will be mentally capable to assist in his defense and stand trial.

“Whenever they make that call, he will come back here” Driskill said.

Johnson, a 24-year-old Tech student at the time of the incident, faces charges of second-degree murder and attempted seconddegree murder for allegedly killing local artist Annie Richardson with a knife and wounding three others outside Tech’s Lambright Sports and Wellness Center on Nov. 13, 2023.

Johnson allegedly came up behind Richardson and retired judge Cynthia Woodard and stabbed them as they were leaving a senior exercise class at the Lambright Center, then turned his knife on fellow student Dominique McKane when McKane tried to help the two women, then finally grazed Hollimon’s face before fleeing the scene.

The attack sent a shockwave among the Ruston community, partly because some of the victims were well-known residents, the incident occurred in the middle of the day, and because none of the victims knew the assailant personally, according to law enforcement.

Johnson was arrested minutes after the attack, and after a sanity review, 3rd District ad hoc Judge Chet Traylor ruled in January that Johnson was mentally competent to proceed to trial.

But in May, the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeal overturned that ruling, compelling Traylor to allow Johnson to be committed to ELMHS.

Mental health experts appointed to Johnson’s sanity commission reported that Johnson told them he experiences “auditory hallucinations” in the form of voices telling him to harm himself and others.

The commission’s report said it couldn’t be determined from interviewing Johnson whether these hallucinations were an ongoing condition, a temporary drug-induced one, or simply fake.

That’s what his assignment to the ELMHS hospital, albeit six months later, is supposed to determine.