Search for escaped inmates continues
One of two men who escaped from a prison van Tuesday in western Oklahoma had been arrested in New Jersey and accused of waving a Confederate flag and shouting racial slurs outside a Toby Keith concert.
The incident was just a part of Darren Walp’s criminal history, which reaches back more than a decade and spans much of the United States.
Walp, 37, and Andrew Jason Foy, 32, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, overpowered two transport officers from Inmate Services Corp. about 3:25 a.m. Tuesday near U.S. 412 in Orienta and escaped.
The stolen van was later found in Ringwood and an empty gun holster was found inside. Authorities think the two inmates may have stolen a pickup, described as a maroon 2006 Dodge Ram with Oklahoma tag DEL244.
The two were still at large Wednesday afternoon, the Major County Sheriff’s Office reported.
“We have nothing,” Major County Sheriff Steven Randolph said. “There have been no sightings, no phone calls. It’s like they vanished. It’s weird.”
Randolph said Walp has a criminal history 65 pages long, beginning in 1999. That history includes being arrested twice in 2013 in Camden, New Jersey, for bias harassment.
In a June 2013 incident, Walp was arrested at a Toby Keith concert held in Camden, New Jersey, after he climbed a fence at a nearby residential complex and began waving a Confederate flag and shouting racial slurs, according to a news release from the Camden County Police Department.
Camden County Police Chief J. Scott Thomson said the actions were “unprovoked,” and that Walp attempted to escape into the concert crowd before being arrested.
He was arrested on complaints of bias intimidation, disorderly conduct, criminal trespassing and harassment.
According to the South Jersey Times, Walp was arrested in Camden again at a Blake Shelton concert on Aug. 10, 2013, after a similar incident.
Authorities said Walp had stopped at a traffic light and climbed out of the cab of his pickup to grab a beer from the bed when he spotted a black motorist nearby and began shouting racial slurs at the man, the newspaper reported. The victim flagged down a Camden County officer, who later found Walp in the parking lot of the Susquehanna Bank Center, now called the BB&T Pavilion.
“We never want to see this individual in the city of Camden again,” Thomson said at the time of the incident.
It wasn’t Walp’s last encounter with law enforcement. In January 2015, Walp held police at bay for nearly 20 hours in Hamilton, Montana, when they tried to arrest him on a warrant for charges of sexual intercourse without consent.
During the standoff, Walp told police negotiators that he had a handgun and was going to force a confrontation with the officers, Hamilton Police Chief Ryan Oster told the newspaper The Missoulian.
Seward County, Kansas, Undersheriff Gene Ward said Walp was arrested in Tennessee on an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in connection with a case about a stolen tractor trailer in Kansas earlier in the year.
Ward said the escaped inmate didn’t have any ties to Kansas and that it appeared he was released on bail and failed to return to court.
Foy was being taken to Wyoming on felony warrants for failure to appear in connection to cases involving burglary, forgery and credit card fraud as well as a misdemeanor warrant for property crime, Laramie County Sheriff’s Capt. Linda Gesell said.
He was arrested in Pennsylvania and was en route to Wyoming at the time of the escape.