Posted By Staff
(CBS)–The search is on for two very dangerous men — killers who made a daring escape from a New York prison over the weekend.
CBS News has learned that investigators are questioning a female employee of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora — about whether she helped the convicts.
Monday, checkpoints in and out of town continue to be manned by armed officers, while schools have extra security.
“They could be literally anywhere.” said N.Y. State Police Maj. Charles Guess. “We are leaving no stone unturned.”
Authorities say the two men used power tools to cut their way through the wall of their adjacent cells, break through a brick wall and climb out onto a six-story high catwalk. They then cut a hole into a 24-inch wide steam pipe, shimmied through a maze of tunnels before cutting a lock and chain on a manhole cover three blocks from their prison wing to complete their escape. One of the few things they left behind was a note apparently taunting their pursuers.
“Our forensics investigation unit has recovered some limited cutting tools,” said Guess. “We presume that perhaps more sophisticated tools may have been used, but we did not recover sophisticated cutting tools.”
Contractors have been doing work on the 150-year-old prison and investigators believe that may be how the two men acquired power tools.
Richard Matt, 48, kidnapped, killed and dismembered his boss in 1997 before fleeing to Mexico. There, the career criminal who had escaped jail before was imprisoned for murdering a man at a bar.
Matt was considered such a threat that during his American snipers watched outside of the courthouse and police even put taser electrodes under his suit to keep him under control. Before the escape he was serving 25 years to life.
David Sweat was a 22-year-old burglary suspect in 2002 when he and his accomplices shot a deputy sheriff 15 times and ran him over. Now 34, Sweat was serving a sentence of life in prison.
“It was a traumatic event for not only the members of this agency, but also the community,” said Fred Akshar, with the Broome County Sheriff’s Department.
One of the first things investigators said they looked for were security tapes but this prison has very limited video capability and there are no cameras on the street where the men escaped from the manhole. Both Canada and Mexico, where Richard Matt served time for murder have been alerted.
The search is being conducted under difficult conditions. It’s a heavily wooded area in the Adirondacks, but also there has been a lot of heavy rain which makes it not only difficult for the searchers and the helicopters to get into the air, but the bloodhounds too can lose the scent in heavy rain.
