Convicted Bay Area murderer killed in California prison

A Bay Area man was killed last week in a Central Valley prison where he’d been serving a life sentence for murdering a close friend, officials said.

On Thursday, guards at Kern Valley State Prison found Jacob Kober unresponsive and suffering from “serious injuries” in the cell that he shared with Matthew Perez, authorities said in a statement.

Kober, 35, was pronounced dead half an hour later after he failed to respond to medical treatment, authorities said.

Perez, 39, who is suspected of killing Kober, was taken to an outside hospital to be treated for wounds of his own, officials said. Both Kober and Perez had injuries that authorities called “consistent with an incarcerated-manufactured weapon” — typically a makeshift knife.

Perez was sent to prison in 2012 to serve 18 years for assault with a firearm and gang and gun enhancements. He has since been sentenced to serve another eight years for assault and two years for possessing drugs in prison, officials said.

An investigation into Kober’s death is ongoing, authorities said.

Kober had been serving a sentence of 80 years to life for murdering a high school friend. According to an appellate decision that summarized testimony at his 2015 trial in Alameda County Superior Court, Kober suspected that his friend, Kenneth Robert Ogden, was sleeping with his girlfriend.

Ogden, who previously dated Kober’s girlfriend, also accrued a drug debt of several hundred dollars to Kober, according to the appellate decision.

The night of Dec. 28, 2012, Ogden went to a house in Livermore where Kober sold methamphetamine and marijuana. The home abutted a golf course. After Kober and Ogden walked onto the course, a neighbor recalled hearing three pops.

The next morning, a jogger spotted Ogden’s body on the fairway of the fourth hole. He’d been shot in the arm and through the chest, piercing his heart.