Report details how killer escaped from prison

LAS VEGAS – A newly released report details how a convicted killer briefly escaped last year from a prison northeast of Las Vegas, leading to the resignation of Nevada’s corrections director.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Sunday that Porfirio Duarte-Herrera used lotion and electricity to break out of his cell window at the Southern Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs on Sept. 23, 2022.

According to a 16-page report released Thursday by the Nevada Department of Corrections and obtained by the newspaper, Duarte-Herrera needed only four minutes to scale three fences and knew the prison towers at the medium-security facility weren’t being manned at the time of his escape.

Duarte-Herrera, 43, was arrested five days later.

The newspaper said state officials complained that the department under Daniels didn’t notify law enforcement until four days after learning that DuarteHerrera could not be found at the prison.

The escape was denounced by then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak as “a serious and unacceptable breach of protocol” and led to Corrections Director Charles Daniels’ resignation a week after the escape occurred, the Review-Journal said.

The report said the 5-foot-4, 135-pound DuarteHerrera fashioned a “dummy” made from cardboard and towels and put it in his bunk prior on the evening of his escape.

Duarte-Herrera told authorities he hid behind a partition for five hours and used leather gloves that prison yard labor inmates would don to avoid injuring his hands as he climbed over two razor-wired fences.

Investigators determined Duarte-Herrera broke through the cell window after using an electronic device he made as a transducer to supply electrical current through lotion smeared on the metal slats attached to the window frame to erode it.

The report said Duarte-Herrera told authorities that he walked about 37 miles (60 kilometers) to reach Las Vegas. He was later arrested by police at a bus station as he tried to get a ride to Tijuana, Mexico.

Duarte-Herrera, from Nicaragua, was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 after being convicted of first-degree murder.

He was accused of killing a hot dog stand vendor using a motion-activated bomb in a hotel-casino’s parking lot on the Las Vegas Strip.

After being captured last year, Duarte-Herrera was moved to the maximum-security Ely State Prison more than 250 miles from Las Vegas.