Two Arkansas prison employees have been fired after they unknowingly helped a former police chief convicted of murder and rape escape from a high-security prison in May, dressed in a fake law enforcement uniform, officials said.
One of the employees was a kitchen supervisor who allowed the inmate, Grant Hardin, onto a loading dock where prisoners were not supposed to go unsupervised, Arkansas prison officials said. The other was a guard in a prison tower who buzzed open a gate and let Mr. Hardin walk out of the prison, without checking to see if he was actually a law enforcement official, officials said.
Both employees were fired for having violated prison policy, Benny Magness, the chairman of the Arkansas Board of Corrections, told state lawmakers at a hearing on Thursday. Their names have not been publicly released.
“You had two people, unfortunately, if either of them would have said, ‘No,’ if any of them would have stopped, Mr. Hardin wouldn’t have gotten out,” Mr. Magness said. He described it as a case of “human error” and not intentional malfeasance.
Mr. Hardin, 56, who worked in the prison kitchen, exploited his job there to carry out his escape from the prison in Calico Rock, Ark., on May 25, officials said. He was captured on June 6, less than two miles from the prison, ending an intense manhunt.
On the day of his escape, he asked the kitchen supervisor if he could go onto the loading dock to clean out a cage that held cleaning chemicals, officials said.
As a kitchen worker, Mr. Hardin was allowed onto the dock to throw out trash and retrieve cleaning supplies, officials said. But prisoners are not allowed in the area without a staff member, said Rand Champion, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
Once on the loading dock, Mr. Hardin changed into a fake law enforcement uniform, which he had assembled from everyday prison supplies and had stashed in a storage area, Mr. Champion said.
It included a badge made from the top of a soup can and the cover of a Bible, a white T-shirt and pants that had been dyed with a black marker and a vest with a white patch on the back that had been fashioned from an old kitchen apron, officials said.
Mr. Hardin then walked out of the prison after a guard in a tower opened a gate for him, Mr. Champion said. The guard “should have gotten verbal positive identification or checked credentials to see who it was before allowing him to leave,” Mr. Champion said.
“This was a case of employee complacency,” he added.
As Mr. Hardin walked through the gate, he was wheeling a cart that was holding a ladder made from wooden pallets and a box that concealed a bag with peanut-butter sandwiches and extra clothes, Mr. Champion said. Mr. Hardin had planned to use the ladder to scale a prison wall if the gate had not been opened, Mr. Champion said.
After Mr. Hardin was captured, he was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Varner, Ark. He has pleaded not guilty to charges related to the escape and is scheduled to go on trial in November, Mr. Champion said.
A former police chief in Gateway, Ark., Mr. Hardin had been fired multiple times from law enforcement jobs, and was trailed by reports of using excessive force, poor performance and, in one instance, falsifying a police report, according to local news media.
In 2017, he pleaded guilty to fatally shooting a man in Arkansas and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. While in prison, Mr. Hardin’s DNA was tied to an unsolved rape case. He pleaded guilty to rape and kidnapping in 2018, and was sentenced to an additional 50 years in prison.
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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