3 officers shot when supremacist breaks out
Escaped inmate, accomplice sought after ambush at Boise hospital
A White supremacist Idaho prison gang member and an accomplice remained on the loose Wednesday after the accomplice staged a brazen overnight attack to free the inmate as he was being transported from a Boise hospital, police said.
Three corrections officers were shot and wounded — two by the accomplice and one by responding police — during the attack in the ambulance bay at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center.
Police throughout the region were looking for the suspected shooter — still unidentified as of Wednesday afternoon — as well as the escaped inmate, described by officials as White supremacist gang member Skylar Meade. Meade, 31, was sentenced to 20 years in 2017 for shooting at a sheriff's sergeant during a high-speed chase.
The pair fled in a gray four-door sedan, possibly a Honda Civic, with Idaho plates, police said.
The attack occurred at 2:15 a.m. as Idaho Department of Correction officers prepared to bring Meade back to prison. Department Director Josh Tewalt said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that Meade was taken to the hospital at 9:35 p.m. Tuesday after he engaged in “self-injurious behavior” and medical staff determined he needed emergency care.
One officer shot by the suspect was in critical but stable condition, police said, while the second wounded officer had serious but nonlife-threatening injuries. The third injured corrections officer also sustained non-life-threatening injuries when a responding officer — incorrectly believing the shooter was still in the emergency room and seeing an armed person near the entrance — opened fire.
“This brazen, violent, and apparently coordinated attack on Idaho Department of Corrections personnel, to facilitate an escape of a dangerous inmate, was carried out right in front of the Emergency Department, where people come for medical help, often in the direst circumstances,” Boise Police Chief Ron Winegar said in a written statement.