What a surprise.
The suspect arrested in connection with the first homicide of 2008 in Charlotte has a long criminal history stretching back to an assault with a deadly weapon on a public official conviction in Granville County in 1995. Iaian Evans McClellan, 29, served five years in prison for that felony offense, state records show.
The N.C. Department of Corrections had trouble containing McClellan. Back in 1998 The Charlotte Observer detailed the opening of a new $8 million supermax unit at the Polk Youth Institution:
Iaian McClellan of Charlotte was the first of the 12 inmates now assigned to the supermax unit. The 20-year-old inmate, who has spent three years in two other state prisons, assaulted correctional officers, threw urine on guards and exposed himself to female staff, according to a prison report.
McClellan has repeatedly gotten into trouble during his three years in prison. The 5-foot-8, 150-pound inmate has been cited for 63 infractions, according to prison records.
McClellan, like the other inmates assigned to the supermax unit, will spend at least six months in the concrete cells. If the prisoners continue to misbehave, they could spend years locked up in solitary confinement.
But within months of his release in November 2000, McClellan was causing mayhem in Mecklenburg County. State records also show a felony conviction for damage to property with explosives, with that offense coming on New Year’s Day 2001. Incredibly, some Mecklenburg County judge gave McClellan probation for that stunt. But by November 2001 McClellan was tagged with a felony arson charge and was back in prison in 2002 for a couple months. In December 2004 he finally does about eight months on the explosives charge after his probation is revoked.
Within weeks of his August 2005 release, McClellan — who also goes by Ion and Ian — shows up in the Mecklenburg County jail on two misdemeanor charges.
Then in June 2006 McClellan is again arrested by the Mecklenburg sheriff’s department on violent felony charges, this time using a gun to inflict serious injury and felony possession of a firearm. Jail records indicate that McClellan was held on these charges until December 27, 2007.
Some time between then and December 31, 2007, Iaian Evans McClellan obtained another gun. A few hours later 53-year old Gerald Nathaniel Poage suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and died.
