U.S.
Seth Wenig / AP
A prison employee who had been questioned about her suspected role in the escape of two convicted killers from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, has been arrested, state police said on Friday.
The employee, Joyce Mitchell, 51, will be arraigned on charges of first-degree promoting prison contraband and fourth-degree criminal facilitation, state police said. She is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt and giving them contraband.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier the contraband did not include power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.
Meanwhile, law enforcement officers continued to search for the escapees, concentrating Friday in a rural area near the prison. The hunt for the inmates was focused on an area where residents reported seeing two men jumping a stone wall outside the town.
About 300 searchers were added, bringing the total number of state, federal and local law enforcement officers involved in the manhunt to more than 800.
An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell is also suspected of agreeing to be their getaway driver but didn't show up, leaving the men on foot early Saturday morning.
Wylie said that within the past year, officials looked into whether Mitchell had improper ties to Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff's deputy. Wylie gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship and said the investigation didn't turn up anything sufficient to warrant disciplinary charges against her.
Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, cut through steel and bricks and crawled through a steampipe, emerging from a manhole outside the 40-foot-high walls of the maximum-security prison, about 20 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border.
State troopers lined a rural road outside Dannemora on Friday morning as they focused their efforts on a new search area southwest of the wooded, swampy landscape that police combed through Thursday.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that investigators are "talking to several people who may have facilitated the escape." He warned that the law will come down hard on any prison system employee who crosses the line.
"If you do it, you will be convicted, and then you'll be on the other side of the prison that you've been policing, and that is not a pleasant place to be," he said.
Sharon Currier, a longtime neighbor, was stunned by the suspicions swirling around Mitchell. "I just can't believe she'd do something so stupid," Currier said, adding that Mitchell is "not somebody who's off the wall."
Currier said Mitchell had been the tax collector for Dickinson, a town near Dannemora. Skilled at sewing, Mitchell worked for at least five years at the prison, where her husband is also employed, Currier said.
Larry Jeffords, an engineer who has done work at the prison, said that the cutting of the cell walls and steampipe was done with a high degree of professionalism, suggesting the two convicts were either highly proficient with the tools or had help.
"I could have sent my best man up there with an acetylene torch or a plasma cutter, and I couldn't have a better hole," he said.
He said that the cutting of the walls and pipe would have taken about four hours of continuous work and that he couldn't believe no one heard or saw anything suspicious.
"I'm assuming it was a grinder, and … the grinding dust is tremendous — sparks, smoke," Jeffords said.
Wire services
Bill Gavin, fmr asst director of the FBI, discusses the new developments on the investigation about the escaped inmates
Authorities have set up road blocks, closed highways and told people to stay in their homes as the search enters day six
The search continues about 40 miles south of the Clinton Correctional Facility for two escaped convicts
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