Manhunt for convicts shifts after sighting report

Associated Press

FRIENDSHIP, N.Y.

Investigators tracking two murder convicts who escaped from a northern New York prison scoured a rural area near the Pennsylvania border Sunday, saying an unconfirmed but credible report of a sighting had shifted the search across the state.

About 300 law-enforcement officers searched the neighboring towns of Amity and Friendship, where two men who resembled the convicts were spotted Saturday near a railroad line that runs along a county road.

While state police called the sighting unconfirmed, the intense hunt that had focused for two weeks around a prison near the Canadian border was quickly expanded to a rural, mountainous area 350 miles away, dotted with sheds, trailers, summer homes and other potential hideouts.

“We will search under every rock, behind every tree and structure until we are confident that that area is secure,” State Police Maj. Michael J. Cerretto said at a news conference Sunday.

Concentrating in the area along County Route 20 and Interstate 86, officers walked railroad tracks, checked car trunks and deployed search dogs as a helicopter flew back and forth overhead. At one point, state police outfitted in camouflage could be seen heading into some woods.

But the state police added in a release Sunday evening that “a primary focus of the search” is still the area around far northern Dannemora, where David Sweat and Richard Matt used power tools to break out of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6.

If the two escapees are still together, that’s not surprising, experts said.

Until Saturday, the search for Matt and Sweat was concentrated in a several-mile radius around the prison in the Adirondacks. After a woman called in Saturday’s possible sighting in Friendship, police interviewed the witness at length and decided she was credible and the tip bore investigating, Cerretto said.

Authorities also said Friday that two men fitting the descriptions of Sweat and Matt had been seen a week ago in Steuben County, east of Allegany County.