Prison worker arrested, accused of assisting two escape from N.Y. prison
A worker at an upstate New York maximum-security prison was arrested Friday on charges she helped two convicted killers escape, state police said.
They said 51-year-old Joyce Mitchell will be arraigned on charges of first-degree promoting prison contraband and fourth-degree criminal facilitation.
Mitchell is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and giving them contraband.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier the contraband didn’t include the power tools the men used to cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe as they escaped last weekend.
The search for the escapees continued Friday, focusing on a rural area near the prison outside the far northern New York town of Dannemora where residents reported seeing two men jumping a stone wall. About 300 searchers were added, bringing the total number of state, federal and local law enforcement officers involved in the manhunt to more than 800.
Mitchell’s family has said she wouldn’t have helped the convicts break out. An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell is also suspected of agreeing to be their getaway driver, but didn’t show up, leaving the men on foot early Saturday morning.
Mitchell has a $56,000-a-year job overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison.
Within the past year, officials had looked into whether Mitchell had improper ties to the 34-yearold Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff ’s deputy, Wylie said. He gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship.
The investigation didn’t turn up anything solid enough to warrant disciplinary charges against her, the district attorney said.
Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt’s 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river.
The state corrections department would not comment on the investigation into how the two inmates escaped or what Mitchell might have provided them.