Prison worker arraigned, accused of aiding escape

Associated Press

DANNEMORA, N.Y.

A worker at an upstate New York maximum- security prison has been arraigned on charges she helped two convicted killers escape, state police said Friday.

Fifty-one-year-old Joyce Mitchell was arrested and arraigned on the felony charge of first-degree promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor count of fourth-degree criminal facilitation, authorities said.

Mitchell is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and giving them contraband.

District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier the contraband didn’t include power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.

Wylie would not elaborate on the charges Friday as more than 800 law- enforcement officers continued to search for the fugitives, concentrating in a rural area around the prison in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Earlier, residents reported seeing two men jumping a stone wall outside Dannemora.

“We’re coming for you, and we will not stop until you are caught,” state police Maj. Charles Guess said in addressing the fugitives as he headed a news conference after Mitchell’s arrest.

Guess said officers were getting closer with every step they take on the ground and in the investigation. Though searchers were contending with bad weather, so were Sweat and Matt, the major said.

“They’ve got to be cold, wet, tired and hungry” if they haven’t escaped the area or found shelter, Guess said.

Mitchell’s family has said she wouldn’t have helped the convicts break out.

An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell also is suspected of agreeing to be a getaway driver but didn’t show up, leaving the men on foot early Saturday.

Mitchell has a job with a yearly salary of $57,697, overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison. Amid the criminal case, she was suspended without pay.

Within the past year, officials looked into whether Mitchell had improper ties to the 34-year-old Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a deputy sheriff, Wylie said. He gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship.

The investigation didn’t turn up anything solid enough to warrant disciplinary charges against her, the district attorney said.

Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt’s 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river.