3 hours ago
2
Several people have been arrested on accusations of helping some of the 10 men who broke out of New Orleans’ jail on 16 May – and half of the escapers remained on the run as a manhunt for them entered its second week, according to authorities.
Police said on Friday that they had booked Casey Smith, 30, a day earlier on allegations that she provided transportation to at least two of the escapers in the hours after the jailbreak. She had allegedly admitted to doing that alongside another woman whom police took into custody on Wednesday, identified as 32-year-old Cortnie Harris, Smith’s cousin and the girlfriend of one of the escaped men, Leo Tate, 31.
Smith confessed to police who questioned her that she drove to multiple places with Harris, Tate and Jermaine Donald, 42, at some point after the breakout but “never attempted to contact the police to forward any information”, according to sworn statements filed in criminal court by investigations.
Meanwhile, 59-year-old Connie Weeden, of the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, was arrested on Thursday, too, reportedly on allegations of giving cash to Donald over a cellphone app. Tate and Donald were still at large as of Friday.
Before that, Corvanntay Baptiste, 38, of Slidell, had been arrested on suspicion of speaking with yet another escaper – Corey Boyd, 19 – by phone and over social media. She also allegedly gave Boyd food while he was inside a home before authorities recaptured him.
Jail maintenance worker Sterling Williams, 33, was booked after allegedly admitting to officials that one of the escaped men had threatened to stab him if he did not turn the water off to a toilet in a particular cell at the facility. Williams allegedly did that, and then the escapers yanked open a cell door and fled through a hole in the wall behind the toilet in question – scrawling taunting messages including “catch us when you can” and “fuck” the sheriff’s office operating the jail – without officials at the lockup noticing for hours.
Beside Donald and Tate, officials on Friday were continuing to search for Derrick Groves, Lenton Vanburen and Antoine Massey. Kendall Myles, 20; Robert Moody, 21; and Dkenan Dennis, 24, had all been caught within hours of getting away. Boyd and Gary Price, 21, were arrested on Monday.
Many of those men were awaiting trials on violent charges, including murder, when they escaped – scaling a barbed wire fence and scampering across a highway – while the lone jail staffer monitoring them left for food.
The sensational nature of the breakout has captured international media attention while casting an unflattering light on the city’s long-troubled jail and criminal justice systems.
For instance, Groves is the grandson of Kim Groves, who filed a brutality complaint against a New Orleans police officer before the officer then hired a hitman to shoot her to death in 1994 in what was one of the city’s most notorious murder cases.
The officer, Len Davis, eventually received a death sentence. But Joe Biden, at the end of his presidency, commuted the punishment to life imprisonment amid a grant of clemency for 37 death row inmates.
Meanwhile, Derrick Groves was in New Orleans’ jail after being convicted of two murders as well as pleading guilty to a pair of other killings. He had been at the lockup that generally houses defendants awaiting trial rather than a state prison where convicted murderers serve out their life sentences awaiting post-conviction proceedings. His attorney had also been suspended from practicing law for two years in part for admitting to taking money from clients during a previous suspension.
Separately, as the Associated Press reported, the breakout had occurred more than 10 years after the sheriff’s office in charge of the jail had endorsed a federal consent decree, a detailed plan aiming to overhaul policies at the facility to reduce violence and improve inmate medical treatment.
One scandal that preceded the implementation of that consent decree – which was still in effect on Friday – involved a series of videos that showed people at an earlier iteration of the jail now known as the Orleans Justice Center (OJC) drinking beer, ingesting drugs and ejecting bullets from a handgun.
Yet, as scandalous as they once were, those videos do not compare to the seriousness of the 16 May jailbreak, said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group.
If New Orleans’ sheriff, Susan Hutson – who took office in 2022 – “or anyone was thinking about terminating the jail consent decree, this escape has ended any serious discussion about that”, Goyeneche said.
Court documents filed on Friday and obtained by the Guardian revealed there was a brazen but failed attempt to escape at the OJC on 1 May. In that case, two incarcerated men hoisted a third – identified as Tevin Arbuthnot – who crawled into the ceiling of a pod of cells.
Arbuthnot was caught after he fell through the ceiling, which evidently collapsed under his weight, court records said.
Two days later, New Orleans voters fell four ballots short of rejecting the renewal of a property tax funding maintenance, staffing and certain programs at Hutson’s office.
Hutson is up for re-election in October and is expected to face multiple challengers. Within days of the 10-man breakout, she told the New Orleans city council that her office needed millions of dollars to fix various problems at the jail or she “cannot guarantee” people incarcerated at the facility would not be left unattended in the future.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
