Corrections workers fired over escape

Associated Press

MANSFIELD

Four Ohio corrections employees have been fired over the escape of an inmate serving a life sentence for rape, officials said Monday.

The employees were fired from the Mansfield Correctional Institution between Oct. 9 and Friday, two of them for failing to properly supervise tools at the prison, falsifying forms and forging signatures on maintenance inventories, according to firing documents released by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Those actions “compromised or undermined the security of the institution” and helped inmate James David Myers escape.

A third worker failed to properly supervise and count inmates who were on work duty, and a fourth didn’t respond to numerous fence alarms during the escape, according to the documents.

On July 3, Myers used a pickax to break into a storage area and get three ladders, which he used to escape over three 14-foot security fences. He was arrested the next day after people in a general store recognized him and tackled and tied him up.

Myers, who turned 47 the day of his escape, was transferred to the higher-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

Myers, formerly of Mogadore, is serving a life sentence stemming from his 2010 conviction on kidnapping, rape, aggravated burglary and other charges out of northeastern Ohio’s Summit County. Prosecutors alleged he raped an Akron woman at gunpoint and forced her to consume cocaine, and an appeals court upheld his conviction, according to court records.