1997 Adirondacks escape is rare unsolved case
Inmate walked away from shock incarceration facility and has never been heard from since
More than 20 years ago, a man convicted of drug possession in Albany wandered out of a state prison in Essex County and was never found.
Victor Figueroa was supposed to be headed to the mess hall at 10 a.m. on Feb. 6, 1997. Instead, he simply walked away from the Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility in Mineville.
In the days that followed, upstate newspapers ran short wire service stories about the disappearance — a far cry from the deluge of national media coverage after the 2015 escape of two convicted murderers from Clinton Correctional Facility.
“Escape From Dannemora,” a limited series about the breakout and ensuing manhunt for David Sweat and Richard Matt, is slated to premiere on Showtime on Sunday evening.
Figueroa never got such fanfare. Yet he is the only state prison inmate who has never been found after an escape.
When the Utica man disappeared from Moriah, located about 100 miles north of Albany, correction officers, troopers and police dogs scoured the area around the minimumsecurity men’s prison.
The searchers followed footprints that led from the facility to the only entrance of a shuttered iron mine across Fisher Hill Road.
That’s where — as far as the state was concerned — the trail ended.
“Ultimately it was determined, based on the evidence, that the absconder had most likely fallen into one of the abandoned mine shafts and the risk to the wellbeing of the search crews was too great to continue,” state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision spokesman Thomas Mailey said in an email.
Figueroa’s body was never recovered, but his escape led the agency to review its security procedures ahead of court appearances by inmates.
He had snuck out of the Moriah prison shortly after being issued street clothes for an upcoming meeting with a judge. Now, inmates at the shock facility who are given civilian clothes remain under watch by a prison guard until they’re transferred to court custody.
Shock incarceration is a six-month boot camp where young, non-violent offenders are put through a military-style routine of exercise, work, education, substance abuse treatment and life skills counseling. Successful completion of the program can significantly shorten an inmate’s sentence and radically lower their chance of recidivism.
These minimum-se- curity facilities stand in stark contrast to other state prisons — picture a reconfigured forestry camp as opposed to the towering walls of maximum-security.
Escapes in general, though, are rare in New York.
State prison breaks peaked in 1994, with 31 escapes, but have declined ever since. Twenty people broke out between 2003 and 2010, but most were housed in minimum-security facilities or out on work details.
There are more than 48,000 people currently in state custody, but in the past 30-odd years, less than 300 have successfully escaped. All of those prisoners have been found — except Figueroa.
He was serving a oneto four-year sentence for felony attempted drug possession, and escaped from the Moriah facility just three months into his sentence. It’s unclear if he had a plan.
The 21-year-old had been arrested the previous summer by Albany County Sheriff’s investigators on an Adirondack Trailways bus leaving Albany for Utica.
Investigators had boarded the bus at about 3:40 a.m. Aug. 1, 1996, in search of people carrying drugs. They asked every rider for identification and looked for “certain indicators,” such as sweating or suddenly moving a bag, according to the Times Union’s archive. Figueroa was busted with 60 packets of heroin.
The details of his life before that are even more sparse.
Figueroa was small in stature — standing 5-foot5 and weighing 135 pounds — and had no tattoos. And he was living on Utica’s Dudley Avenue, inside a two-story apartment building that is boarded up and abandoned on a Google Streetview photograph taken in September 2015.
He had a seventh-grade education and no job, according to his arrest report. He was born in Puerto Rico and was unmarried. Attempts to locate and contact his family were unsuccessful.
The state prison system doesn’t even have Figueroa’s mug shot on file anymore, but a dusty one exists in Albany County Hall of Records.
He looks tired and alone.
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