Oregon State Police have opened an investigation into the suspicious death of former Coquille man Monday at the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario. It’s the second death of a former Coos County resident at the prison in three weeks.

An Oregon Department of Corrections press release identified the inmate as 61-year-old James Ivan Briggs. Briggs was found dead in his cell at 6:52 a.m. Monday. An autopsy is scheduled at the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Portland on Wednesday.

OSP, the Malheur County District Attorney Office and corrections staff are partnering on the investigation. Briggs’ family had been notified, OSP said. No other information was released.

Briggs was serving a 23-year sentence on sex abuse convictions and had been at the prison since January 2003. A Coos County jury convicted Briggs in November 2002 of two counts of first-degree sodomy, two counts of first-degree sexual abuse and two counts of unlawful sexual penetration.

His conviction followed a six-month investigation in 2002 that began when the victim, a 17-year-old girl, reported she had been sexually abused to child welfare workers after discussing the abuse with religious leaders and family in Coquille. During Briggs’ trial, Coos County Sheriff’s Office investigators told the court the abuse occurred over seven years.

Briggs’s death follows the death on April 25 of inmate Dannie Ray Peck, 42, who was found dead in his cell. At the time, an OSP press release said investigators believed the former Coos Bay man died by suicide, but they did not indicate how.

Peck had been sentenced to life in prison on Aug. 23, 2006, after pleading guilty to the murder of John F. Hildebrand, whom Peck assaulted and kidnapped outside the Wagon Wheel Grocery Store in Hauser on Oct. 4, 2005. He took Hildebrand to the end of the Trans-Pacific Parkway and strangled him. Prosecutors never were able to determine a motive for the killing.