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| Warden: Death row inmates plotted escape, probably had outside help |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 09/06/2004 |
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Three Ga. death row inmates were well under way in plotting an escape through ventilation shafts and likely had outside help, possibly from prison employees, according to a warden's report. Corrections officials were tipped off to the alleged plan Friday and searched all 112 occupied death row cells at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, about 45 minutes south of Atlanta. David Scott Franks, Andrew Grant DeYoung and Michael Wade Nance have been locked in solitary confinement since the alleged plot was discovered. A piece of gray string dangling from an air vent in a cell helped unravel the alleged escape plot, the report said. A prison officer searching the cell pulled the string and noticed that it was secured by a piece of tape painted to conceal a cut in the vent. Franks allegedly had cut through the vent and through another grate in the crawl space behind it. The officers later found a cache of contraband allegedly used by the three inmates to further their escape - welding material, five hacksaw blades, two reciprocating saw blades, knives, duct tape, 25 feet of ``rope'' fashioned from bedsheets, ski masks, $280 in cash and a map of Georgia. Many of the items uncovered in the three cells could only have come from the outside, said Warden Derrick Schofield, who suspects prison employees might have been involved. ``In order to get the amount of contraband found would require some staff involvement,'' Schofield's report said. Two of the inmates told investigators they plotted for months and fooled prison officers by piling blankets and clothing on their beds to make it appear that they were asleep. Instead, they were crawling through ventilation spaces that link the cells and hacking away at bars leading to an exit door. Even if the inmates had been able to escape the death row unit, prison officials said, they still would have had to scale fences topped by razor wire and evade routine vehicle patrols of the grounds. |
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