Two of the 10 prisoners who escaped from New Orleans’s jail on 16 May remained on the run as of Tuesday, after three more of the group were rearrested on Monday, authorities said.
One of the men was arrested by local police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, about 80 miles north-west of New Orleans. Two others were arrested in Walker county, Texas, Louisiana state police said on the Twitter/X.
Louisiana authorities named the latest inmates who were recaptured as Lenton Vanburen, Leo Tate and Jermaine Donald. Jail escapees Dkenan Dennis, Corey Boyd, Gary C Price, Kendell Myles and Robert Moody were previously taken into custody by authorities.
Antoine Massey and Derrick Groves remained at large Tuesday. At least 11 people have been arrested on allegations of helping the group of 10 inmates either before or after the breakout.
Authorities had been scouring the New Orleans area for the escapees after they audaciously broke out of the Orleans Justice Center (OJC). The men yanked open a faulty cell door inside the jail, squeezed through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed-wire fence and fled into the coverage of darkness – all while the lone staffer supervising them had temporary left to get food.
The inmates’ absence wasn’t discovered until a headcount hours later, after they bolted for freedom. Graffiti left on the wall included the message “To Easy LoL” with an arrow pointing to the gap.
City and state officials have pointed to multiple security lapses in the jail. Among those arrested on allegations of aiding the escapees was a jail maintenance worker accused of turning off the water to the toilet, an act authorities said helped the men get out. The worker said one of those incarcerated at the jail had threatened to stab him if he refused.
Many of the men were originally in the OJC awaiting sentences or trials for alleged violent crimes including murder.
Groves’s escape in particular has drawn attention. He has been convicted of a double murder and has pleaded guilty to two other killings.
In an unrelated case that occurred about three years before he was born, Groves’s grandmother, Kim Groves, was slain after filing a brutality complaint against a New Orleans police officer – before the cop then hired a hitman to shoot her to death in 1994 in what was one of the city’s most notorious murders.
Conditions had been deteriorating in New Orleans’s jail in the months before the escape, with unsupervised prisoners smoking marijuana “without fear of consequences” and fashioning weapons out of brooms, mops and buckets, according to a new report released on Tuesday by an independent watchdog monitoring a 2013 agreement with the federal government that was intended to reform the lockup.
The monitor urged the official in charge of the jail – New Orleans sheriff Susan Hutson – to re-establish a high-security unit in the jail, noting the unrelenting violence among prisoners that’s made the facility “not reasonably safe and secure”.
Hutson, a progressive reformer, had abandoned the practice of housing certain inmates in a high-security setting after taking office in 2022.
“Many of the inmate-on-inmate assaults occur because staff allow inmates out of their cells and leave them unsupervised, or inmates are able to manipulate the locks on their cells to open them,” the monitors wrote in the report, which was written before the 10-man escape.
The New Orleans jailbreak wasn’t the only one to make national news headlines recently. On Sunday, Grant Hardin – a former Gateway, Arkansas, police chief who is serving decades-long sentences for murder and rape – escaped from prison after disguising himself in “a makeshift outfit designed to mimic law enforcement”, authorities said.
Officials’ search for Hardin was entering its third day on Tuesday.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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