Manhunt for escaped killers shifts after possible sighting
Investigators tracking two murder convicts who escaped from a northern New York prison scoured a rural area near the Pennsylvania border Sunday, saying an unconfirmed but credible report of a sighting had shifted the search across the state.
About 300 law enforcement officers searched the neighbouring towns of Amity and Friendship, where two men who resembled the convicts were spotted Saturday near a railroad line that runs along a county road.
While state police called the sighting unconfirmed, the intense hunt that had focused for two weeks around a prison near the Canadian border was quickly refocused on a rural, mountainous area more than 550 kilometres away, dotted with sheds, trailers, summer homes and other potential hideouts.
“We will search under every rock, behind every tree and structure until we are confident that that area is secure,” State Police Maj. Michael J. Cerretto said at a news conference Sunday.
David Sweat and Richard Matt broke out of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora on June 6 using power tools and leaving behind dummies under bedcovers in their adjoining cells.
Until Saturday, the search for Matt and Sweat was concentrated in a several-kilometre radius around the prison in the Adirondacks. After a woman called in Saturday’s possible sighting in Friendship, police interviewed the witness at length and decided she was credible and the tip bore investigating, Cerretto said. Authorities also said Friday that two men fitting the descriptions of Sweat and Matt had been seen a week ago in Steuben County, east of Allegany County. Two men were seen walking near a rail yard in Erwin on June 13, and then spotted the next day in Lindley, heading toward the Pennsylvania border.
Sweat, 35, was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. Matt, 48, was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of his former boss.
Prison worker Joyce Mitchell remained in custody on charges she helped the two men escape by providing them hacksaw blades, chisels and other tools. She has pleaded not guilty.
Officials said a corrections officer also has been placed on administrative leave as part of the investigation into the men’s escape.