A worker at an upstate New York maximum-security prison charged with helping two convicted killers escape last weekend brought the men hacksaw blades, chisels, a punch and a screwdriver bit, according to criminal complaints.
Prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell, 51, was arraigned late on Friday night on the felony charge of promoting prison contraband and a misdemeanor count of criminal facilitation. Her lawyer, Keith Bruno, entered a not guilty plea on her behalf.
Mitchell is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, and giving them contraband. The inmates used power tools to cut through their cell walls and a steam pipe and escaped through a manhole a week ago.
Wearing a green short-sleeved top and jeans, Mitchell entered the courtroom with her hands cuffed in front of her. She looked scared and did not speak. She was ordered held in jail on US$100,000 cash bail or US$200,000 bond on felony count and is due back in court tomorrow morning.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier the contraband did not 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.
More than 800 law enforcement officers continued to search for the escapees, 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,” New York State Police Major Charles Guess said in addressing the escapees 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. Although 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 have not escaped the area or found shelter, Guess said.
Mitchell’s family has said she would not have helped the convicts break out.
An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell is also suspected of agreeing to be a getaway driver, but did not show up, leaving the men on foot early on June 6.
Mitchell has a job with a yearly salary of US$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 with the 34-year-old Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff’s deputy, Wylie said. He gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship.
The investigation did not 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.
On Thursday, a person close to the investigation said Mitchell had befriended the two men and agreed to be the getaway driver, but never showed up. The person was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A former slipper-factory employee who won three terms as tax collector in her town near Dannemora, Mitchell has worked at the prison for at least five years, according to a neighbor, Sharon Currier. Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, also works in industrial training there.
“She’s a good, good person,” Currier said. “She’s not somebody who’s off the wall.”
The garment shop is intended to give prisoners job skills and work habits. In general, an inmate assigned to such a job might work several hours per day there, five days per week, meaning he would have significant contact with supervisors.
Mitchell’s union, Civil Service Employees Association Local 1000, would not comment on Friday on the investigation of Mitchell or the current allegations.
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