Massive manhunt continues for murderers of deputy, supervisor

Associated Press

DANNEMORA, N.Y.

The brother of a slain sheriff’s deputy had forgotten the names of those involved in the killing more than a decade ago. Then came a daring prison break: Two convicted murderers hid dummies in their beds and used power tools to cut their way to freedom.

The cunning escape from an upstate New York prison on Saturday had hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement officers searching for one of the deputy’s killers and another man imprisoned for dismembering his boss.

Richard Matt and David Sweat staged what Gov. Andrew Cuomo called “a really elaborate, sophisticated operation” that ended at a manhole cover blocks away from the prison.

The men had filled their beds inside the Clinton Correctional Facility with clothes to appear as though they were sleeping, cut into steel steam pipes and shimmied out of the prison. On one pipe cut in the escape, investigators found a note with a crude Asian caricature along with the words, “Have a nice day.”

Sweat, 34, is serving a sentence of life without parole after he was convicted of first-degree murder for killing a sheriff’s deputy in Broome County, New York, on July 4, 2002. Matt, 48, is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for the kidnapping, dismemberment and killing of his former boss in 1997.

Steven Tarsia, brother of Deputy Kevin Tarsia, said finding out his brother’s killer had escaped “turns your world upside-down all over again.”

He said just the other day, he had been trying to remember the names of the men responsible for his brother’s death, and “I couldn’t remember their names.

“All of a sudden, I remember them again,” he said.

Tarsia told The Associated Press on Sunday he couldn’t imagine how the men could have gotten power tools and escaped without help, but “I don’t know why anybody would help them.”

Cuomo said it was impossible to believe nobody heard the noise of the tools.

“They were heard, they had to be heard,” Cuomo told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Sunday.

Roadblocks were set up in the area around the village of Dannemora, which is about 20 miles from the Canadian border, and bloodhounds and helicopters were being used to track down the men, officials said.