The group scaled a fence along Interstate 10, using blankets they brought to shield themselves from the barbed wire, law enforcement later said. The inmates dashed across train tracks and multiple lanes of traffic, on their way to a nearby neighborhood where they shed their jail jumpsuits.
During a routine head count at 8:30 a.m., officials finally discovered that multiple inmates had escaped. The missing inmates — at first reported to be 11 men before it was later corrected to 10 — triggered a widespread manhunt across Louisiana and seven nearby states: Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Their escape also unleashed several suspensions, questions about lack of transparency and a flurry of accusations about who’s to blame.
A ’fluid situation’ or a ‘dangerous’ one
As authorities at the jail activated “emergency protocols,” the city of New Orleans spent the morning of May 16 unaware that 10 armed and dangerous men had escaped.
The public wasn’t notified until nearly 11 a.m. — almost 10 hours after the inmates had fled and three hours after the sheriff learned they were missing, according to CNN affiliate WDSU. A citywide alert wouldn’t be sent until 2:30 p.m.
Down the road from the Orleans Justice Center, the staff at the district attorney’s office was unaware of the situation unfolding at the jail.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said he walked into the office Friday morning not knowing people his office had convicted were on the run. Williams himself had prosecuted Derrick Groves, one of the escapees who had been convicted of murdering two men.
“The people in my office put people in jail. These inmates don’t like them,” Williams told WDSU. “The fact that (these inmates) are less than 100 feet away and they’ve gotten out…and no one rings an alarm? That’s deeply problematic.” He added that two of his employees have left town because they were worried for their safety.
Williams said his office was notified around 11 a.m., and immediately began calling witnesses. Some of the escaped men, he said, were “known to have threatened witnesses in order to evade prosecution.”
Around 11:13 a.m., he called Deputy US Marshal Brian Fair and Capt. Rodney Hyatt with Troop NOLA for help — and said neither had received contact from the sheriff’s office. He said it was “a very dangerous situation,” made “more dangerous because of the poor leadership and lack of transparency.”
The sheriff’s office said it notified the US Marshals, the Louisiana State Police and the Louisiana Division of Probation and Parole by 9:30 a.m. The New Orleans Police Department was alerted immediately after that, Sheriff Susan Hutson said.
Hutson called it a “fluid situation” as authorities worked to get a handle on 1,400 people in the Orleans Justice Center.
“When this went down, our first concern is to find out who these folks are, confirm, and then we’ve got to lock down the whole jail and … make sure nobody else is missing,” Hutson said. “We are investigating our own to find out exactly what happened and where those lapses were.”
Not alerting the public and press immediately, Williams argued, has only helped the inmates escape.