Hunt for killers who escaped from NY prison enters 11th day
Published 10:10 am Tuesday, June 16, 2015
DANNEMORA, N.Y. — Search teams headed back into the northern New York woods Tuesday for an 11th day of trying to track down two convicted murderers who broke out of a maximum-security prison using tools that authorities say were provided by a woman who worked there.
More than 800 law enforcement officers who are searching for David Sweat and Richard Matt have steadily shifted their focus eastward along Route 374 leading from the village of Dannemora, home of Clinton Correctional Facility.
Officers, some with search dogs, made their way through woods in the neighboring town of Plattsburgh, about 5 miles east of the prison.
Matt, 48, and Sweat, who turned 35 on Sunday, escaped June 6 from the Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border.
Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. Matt was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of his former boss.
Meanwhile, the woman charged with helping the killers flee by providing them with hacksaw blades, chisels and other tools made a second appearance in court Monday.
Prosecutors say Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who had befriended the inmates, had agreed to be the getaway driver but backed out because she still loved her husband and felt guilty for participating.
Mitchell, 51, made her second court appearance in Plattsburgh wearing a striped prison jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest. She waived a preliminary hearing, allowing the case to proceed to a county court.