New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, left, speaks while Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin listens during a news conference in front of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y.
Authorities in New York state searching for two escaped killers who have been on the loose for the better part of a week acknowledged being in the dark about their whereabouts or doings, even as the hunt for the men expanded past state borders into Vermont.
At a news conference outside the maximum-security prison on Wednesday (yesterday, Macau time), New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico said, “I have no information on where they are or what they’re doing, to be honest with you.”
But authorities were expanding the search after investigators learned that the inmates had talked before last weekend’s breakout about going to neighboring Vermont.
“We have information that suggests they thought New York was going to be hot. Vermont would be cooler, in terms of law enforcement,” said Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, at the news conference along with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
He and other officials would not say how authorities learned that information.
Meanwhile, late Wednesday night (yesterday) another search was started closer to the prison.
D’Amico also said that a prison employee — identified in news reports as Joyce Mitchell, a training supervisor at the prison tailor shop — had befriended the killers and “may have had some role in assisting them.”
He would not elaborate.
Mitchell’s son, Tobey Mitchell, told NBC that she checked herself into a hospital with chest pains Saturday. He said she wouldn’t have helped the inmates escape.
Using power tools, inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt cut through a steel wall, broke through bricks and crawled through a steam pipe before emerging through a manhole in the street outside the 3,000-inmate Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York state, about 32 kilometers from the Canadian border.
The breakout was discovered early Saturday, meaning the inmates may have had a head start of several hours, Cuomo said.
The killers’ mugshots have been put on more than 50 digital billboards in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, state police said, and a $100,000 reward has been posted. Michael Hill and Michael Virtanen, Dannemora, NY, AP
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