Search for escaped NY prisoners shifts focus after possible sighting

Investigators tracking two murder convicts who escaped from a northern New York prison scoured a rural area near Pennsylvania on Sunday, then began tracking the pair 350 miles away, as unconfirmed but credible report of sightings shifted the search across the state.

Investigators and military trucks converged on Mountain View, a hamlet in Franklin County, in the northeast corner of the state, late Sunday. 

Acting Franklin County District Attorney Glenn MacNeill told WPTZ-TV Sunday that a person was seen fleeing from a hunting camp in the area. Much of the county is within Adirondack Park.

Hours earlier, about 300 law enforcement officers searched the neighboring towns of Amity and Friendship in southwestern New York, near the border with Pennsylvania, where two men who resembled the convicts were spotted Saturday near a railroad line that runs along a county road.

While state police called the sighting unconfirmed, the intense hunt that had focused for two weeks around a prison near the U.S.-Canada border was quickly expanded to a rural, mountainous area 350 miles away, dotted with sheds, trailers, summer homes and other potential hideouts.

The search in Friendship was winding down by Sunday night, but increased patrols will stay in the area, according to New York State Police spokesman Beau Duffy.

"We will continue to search this area until all leads have been exhausted," New York State Police Maj. Michael Cerretto said on Sunday.

State police received a call early Saturday afternoon from a witness who spotted two men with descriptions similar to the escaped convicts, Richard Matt and David Sweat, on a railroad line in Friendship, Cerretto said.

Police interviewed the witness at length and determined that the witness was credible and the lead should be investigated, he said, calling the sighting "unconfirmed."

But after searching the new area of interest on Sunday, the state police added in a release Sunday evening that "a primary focus of the search" is still the area around far northern Dannemora, where Sweat and Matt used power tools to break out of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6.

If the two escapees are still together, that's not surprising, experts said.

In the wilderness, fugitives often stick together for survival's sake, unless they have planned to split up and reunite at a hideaway, said Patrick Patten, who trains law enforcers in woodland tracking.

The reported sightings of Matt, 48, and Sweat, 35, follow the suspension of corrections officer Gene Palmer at Clinton in connection with the escape.

His lawyer, Andrew Brockway, said Palmer has cooperated with investigators, who questioned him for 14 hours on Saturday.

Joyce Mitchell, 51, a training supervisor in the prison tailor shop, is charged with helping the inmates escape by giving them tools.

The two inmates cut through their cell walls and crawled through a steampipe before emerging from a manhole outside the prison, authorities said.

Wire services