20-year-old scraped, bruised after 2 days in hiding
BY TOM HAYDON
The Star-Ledger
MIDDLESEX COUNTY, N.J. — In the end, the inmate who had been missing for two days never left the Middlesex County Jail. He simply got wedged inside a duct.
After crawling through the jail’s labyrinth of vents for two days, Timothy Petties’ bid to escape from the North Brunswick jail stalled just below a roof hatch.
Though authorities scoured the building with heat-sensing equipment after he went missing from his cell Tuesday morning, Petties eluded them until just after 7 a.m. yesterday, when a corrections officer saw a support wire for a ventilation duct shaking.
“He could have been moving,” said Warden Edmond Cicchi. “It’s like a maze up there.”
Authorities cracked open the duct from the roof within 25 minutes and found a scraped and bruised Petties inside. The 20-year-old prisoner, who was awaiting trial on multiple charges including aggravated assault, was sent to the hospital for treatment, but is expected to return to the jail today. Cicchi said. He’ll also now face escape charges.
Cicchi said the investigation remains ongoing into how Petties managed to disappear from his unit and get into the jail’s ventilation system. He said it appears Petties wriggled his way through the ducts without food or water during his two-day bid for freedom.
Ultimately, Petties crawled to a point where he got stuck and couldn’t reverse course, Cicchi said.
“He got into a certain point where he couldn’t back out,” Cicchi said.
From the outset of Petties’ disappearance Tuesday, when he failed to appear for a 10 a.m. headcount in his unit of 36 inmates, there was no evidence of any way he could have escaped the grounds, Cicchi said. The initial 10 hours of searching focused intensely on places he could be hiding within the jail.
After he was found yesterday, Petties had to be lowered from the roof in a metal basket by firefighters before being ferried to the hospital.
ties has been held at the Middlesex County Adult Correction Center jail since Jan. 19 on $310,000 bail while awaiting trial on aggravated assault charges. He is accused of attacking a woman on three separate occasions between September and December.
He also faces charges of assault and resisting arrest filed by North Brunswick and warrants charging him with missing municipal court appearances in Piscataway, Franklin Township, Somerset County and Union Township, Union County.
His bail will be increased another $50,000 for the escape charge, authorities said.
Cicchi said investigators have determined Petties was in his cell Tuesday during headcounts at 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., but was determined missing during a noon check. Though there was no evidence Petties managed to break through the perimeter security for the jail, he was declared escaped at 8 p.m. Tuesday while authorities continued to search for him inside the jail.
Cicchi said officers heard a noise from a duct near the roof and upon further inspection, saw the support wire shaking. The area had been previously searched by officers, but Cicchi said it is unclear how long Petties spent in that section of duct. In addition, heat blowing through the ducts could have made it difficult for the thermal cameras to locate Petties, Cicchi said.
No prisoner has escaped the jail in the five years Cicchi has been warden.
Thomas Robinson, a career burglar, escaped from the jail July 18, 2000, by walking away from a maintenance area outside the building. Old Bridge police, who had arrested Robinson for burglary, complained that the inmate had been made a trustee at the jail, giving him fewer restrictions than other prisoners.
Robinson was serving a prison term for burglary while awaiting sentencing for other break-ins. Following the escape, Robinson was arrested and sentenced to a state prison, Cicchi said.
Copyright 2008 The Star Ledger