Hundreds of law enforcement officials are involved in a manhunt for eight men who remain at large after a group of 10 inmates broke out of a New Orleans-area jail early Friday morning.
Police say it’s highly likely the escapees from the Orleans Justice Center had inside help, and three Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office employees have been suspended as an investigation into the breakout remains ongoing.
“There is much more than meets the eye to this investigation,” Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said during a Friday evening press conference. “Why did it happen just right now as we’re getting ready to start this sheriff’s race? This is very suspicious. We know that they had help.”
Here’s what you need to know about the shocking escape:
Who escaped and who has been captured?
Early Friday morning, a group of 10 men made it out of the prison. The sheriff’s office has named them as Antoine Massey, Lenton Vanburen, Leo Tate, Kendell Myles, Derrick Groves, Jermaine Donald, Corey Boyd, Gary Price, Robert Moody, and Dkenan Dennis.
State police captured Myles on Friday morning as he hid beneath a car in the parking garage of Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Moody was captured Friday evening, the sheriff’s office told The Independent.
Officials said the men should be considered armed and dangerous, and warned members of the public not to approach any of the escapees and instead call 911.
Police previously said an 11th man, Keith Lewis, was part of the group that escaped, but later discovered he had been moved to a different cell and was briefly unaccounted for. In fact, he remained in custody and was not part of the breakout.
How did they get out?
Inmates began their escape just after midnight on Friday morning, repeatedly pulling on a sliding cell door until it derailed.
Next, they were able to pull bathroom fixtures off their mountings and squeeze through a hole in the adjoining wall.
The sheriff’s office sais this step makes it clear the escapees had help, as it wouldn’t be possible to remove the fixtures and cleanly cut through the metal bars behind them without tools.
By 1:00 a.m., the men made it to the jail’s supply loading bay, then used blankets to scale a security wall and ran across Interstate 10 to freedom.
What could have been done to stop the escape?
Officials have admitted multiple security lapses helped the men escape.
The sheriff’s office told The Independent the men were able to escape due to “defective locks and doors,” and noted that approximately one-third of the security cameras throughout the facility are currently inoperable, including three cameras in the unit where the men escaped.
A surveillance technician was on duty at the time of the escape, but the men were nonetheless “able to breach a wall behind a toilet in their housing unit which was out of view,” the sheriff’s office told The Independent.
Hutson said the escapes highlighted the need for more funding to fix jail infrastructure, including the sliding cell doors, an issue she said she’s raised in the past. The facility needs upwards of $5 million in upgrades, including to its cell doors, and the jail was only at about 60 percent staffing at the time of the breakout, she added.
The lone guard assigned to watch the cell pod from which the men escaped had left to get food during the breakout, The Associated Press reported.
The $145 million Orleans Justice Center opened in 2015 and is considered a relatively modern and state-of-the-art facility.
The previous sheriff, Marlin Gusman, dismissed claims that the jail was left in poor repair, accusing the current sheriff of playing “the blame game” in an interview with WDSU.
In 2023, monitors overseeing the jail as part of a larger federal consent decree in the city reported poor supervision, a spike in inmate violence, fatal overdoses, and the use of unnecessary force against detainees.
Did sheriffs fail to notify fellow police and the public?
Louisiana officials criticized the sheriff’s office for not notifying fellow law enforcement agencies and the public sooner.
“Someone clearly dropped the ball and there’s no excuse for this,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement on X.
The sheriff said she was made aware of the escape shortly after an 8:30 a.m. headcount at the jail revealed the missing men, hours after they had escaped.
New Orleans police chief Anna Kirkpatrick said on Friday during a press conference that her agency didn’t learn about the escapes until around 10:30 a.m., two hours after the disappearance was discovered.
The sheriff’s office said the United States Marshals, Louisiana State Police, and state probation and parole officials were notified by 9:30 a.m., and the New Orleans Police Department was alerted immediately afterward through a police center.
