BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Just days before 10 men , officials with the sheriff’s office asked for money to fix faulty locks and cell doors deemed a key factor in the escape.
As the manhunt for the remaining stretches into a new week, officials continue to investigate who or what was to blame in a jailbreak that even the escapees labeled as “easy” — in a message scrawled on a wall above the narrow hole they squeezed through.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said she has long raised concerns about the jail’s ongoing “deficiencies,” adding that the breakout has “once again highlighted the critical need for repairs and upgrades” to the ailing infrastructure.
The men yanked open a cell door, slipped through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed wire fence and fled from the jail early Friday, recorded surveillance video showed.
Four days earlier, Jeworski “Jay” Mallet — the Chief of Corrections for the Orleans Justice Center — presented a need for a new lock system during the city’s Capital Improvement Plan hearing.
Mallet said the current system at the jail, which houses around 1,400 people, was built for a “minimum custody type of inmate.”
But he classified many at the jail as “high security” inmates who are awaiting trials for violent offenses, including charges such as murder, assault and rape. He said many require a “restrictive housing environment that did not exist” at the jail and, as a result, the sheriff’s office has transferred dozens in custody to more secure locations.
Mallet went on to say that some of the cell unit doors and locks have been “manipulated” to the point that not only are they not secure, but some can’t even be closed properly.
Hutson said the men “yanked” on a locked cell door “to pull it off its track.” They then squeezed through a hole behind a toilet, exited a loading dock door before climbing a barbed-wire fence using blankets and running across a nearby interstate in early morning darkness.
“These are the cells that we keep saying we need to replace at great cost in this facility,” Hutson said.
Since becoming sheriff in 2022, Hutson said she has complained about the locks at every turn and advocated for additional funding to make the facility more secure.
“I wrote a letter to the consent decree judge, to the city council, and everybody else who would listen, and every time I go to budget, I say the exact same thing,” Hutson said.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said during a news conference on Sunday that funding for the jail has been “a priority” and that funding has been allocated to the sheriff’s office for operating expenses and capital improvements. Bianka Brown, the chief financial officer for the sheriff’s office, said the current budget “doesn’t support what we need” to ensure critical fixes and upgrades.
“Things are being deprived,” Brown said of the jail, which for more than a decade has been subject to federal monitoring and a consent decree intended to improve conditions. The jail, which opened in 2015, replaced another facility that had its own history of escapes and violence.
While Hutson said the locks played a key role in the escape, there are other crucial elements that officials have outlined; Indications that the escape may have been an inside job, with three sheriff’s employees now on suspension; the hole that officials said may have been formed using power tools; a lack of monitoring of the cell pod, as the employee tasked with the job had stepped out to grab food; and law enforcement not being aware of the escape until a morning headcount seven hours after the men fled.
Other’s have pointed to Hutson being at fault. State Rep. Aimee Adatto Freeman, who represents much of uptown New Orleans, called for sheriff to step down on Monday.
“Rather than take accountability, she’s pointed fingers elsewhere,” Freeman wrote in a statement. “Blaming funding is a deflection–not an excuse.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry recently announced the state is launching an investigation into who is responsible in the escape. He also directed the state’s Department of Corrections to conduct an audit of the jail’s compliance with basic correctional standards.
“Now there is no excuse for the escape of these violent offenders,” said Landry, a tough-on-crime Republican.
The governor also requested an inventory of pre-trial detainees or those awaiting sentencing in violent cases at the facility, to consider moving them into state custody.
Three of the seven inmates still at large late Monday were convicted of or are facing second-degree murder charges, authorities said.
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