A maintenance worker has been arrested and charged with helping 10 inmates carry out a brazen escape from a New Orleans jail last week, bolstering the suspicion among investigators that the escape would have been impossible without inside help.
The worker, Sterling Williams, 33, who was arrested on Monday, shut off water at the jail, allowing the inmates to remove a metal toilet and sink fixture from a cell wall, the Louisiana attorney general’s office said. Mr. Williams told investigators that an inmate had threatened to “shank him” if he did not shut off the water, according to an affidavit supporting his arrest.
The inmates then used an unidentified tool to cut steel bars behind the cell room sink, leaving behind a hole in the wall just big enough to crawl through and a taunting misspelled message: “to easy LOL.”
The inmates left the jail through a loading dock, scaled a wall, using blankets to protect themselves from barbed wire, and ran across Interstate 10. A civilian employee of the sheriff’s office, who was the only person monitoring security systems in the part of the jail where the escape occurred, had left his station at the time to get food, officials said last week.
According to the affidavit, Mr. Williams told agents from the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation that an inmate with tattoos on his face, whom he called “Massey,” but whose full name is Antoine Massey, “threatened to shank him if he did not turn the water off.”
Instead of reporting the threat, Mr. Williams told agents that he went into a pipe chase — an area where plumbing is concealed behind a wall — and turned off the water by closing a valve, the affidavit states.
With no water running, the inmates were able to remove the sink and toilet fixture from the wall, investigators said.
“If the inmates removed the sink in the cell and disconnected the rest of the plumbing with the water still on, the plan to escape would not have been successful and potentially flooded the cell, drawing attention to their actions,” the affidavit states.
Officials did not notice that the inmates were missing until a routine head count at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, roughly seven hours after they had escaped, Sheriff Susan Hutson of Orleans Parish said last week. She said the office then activated “emergency protocols” and began a search for the inmates.
Five have since been captured, and a manhunt is continuing for the remaining five, including Mr. Massey, 32, who had been jailed on charges of domestic abuse involving battery by strangulation, theft of a motor vehicle and a parole violation, according to the Louisiana State Police. The Louisiana State Police said just before 8 p.m. on Tuesday that it had arrested Corey Boyd, 19, one of the escapees. He had been held on charges including second-degree murder, according to the state police.
The affidavit says that Mr. Williams did not come forward after the escape and that when confronted by agents, he was “initially very evasive and untruthful, but eventually became forthcoming and provided evidentiary information.”
Mr. Williams has been charged with one count of malfeasance in office and 10 counts of being a principal to the escape. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer. At his first appearance in court on Tuesday afternoon, he was ordered held in lieu of $1.1 million bond, the attorney general’s office said.
Liz Murrill, the Louisiana attorney general, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the investigation into the escape was continuing. “Our intent is to make sure this never happens again,” she said, adding that she would “hold everyone accountable that may have been involved before, during and after.”
Sheriff Hutson told the New Orleans City Council on Tuesday that the escape involved “procedural failures and missed notifications.”
“But there were also intentional wrongdoings,” she said. “This was a coordinated effort aided by individuals inside our own agency who made the choice to break the law.”
The sheriff’s office has said that about a third of the cameras in the jail were not working, and that it had “defective locks and doors.” It has asked city officials for $13 million to upgrade security at the jail, which was holding about 1,400 inmates — far more than its guards could handle, Sheriff Hutson said.
“We are operating with outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in supervision and critical staffing shortages,” she said in a statement. “These vulnerabilities have been raised repeatedly in our funding requests and now the consequences are undeniable.”
Hank Sanders contributed reporting.
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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