By Jeff Adelson
Times-Picayune
Two serious flaws in the St. Tammany Parish jail’s maximum-security wing allowed four inmates to remove a cell’s window using a hacksaw and squeeze through the 6-inch-wide opening it left behind, Sheriff Jack Strain said Thursday.
After jumping out of the second-floor window in Jason Gainey’s cell, Gainey and his three accomplices cut through fence wires in the prison yard, ran underneath an empty guard tower and climbed over a razor-wire-topped fence.
The June 18 escape of Gainey, accused of aiding in the murder of Mandeville-area homemaker Samantha Jaume on July 4, 2001, and three other inmates prompted the largest manhunt in St. Tammany Parish history. Three of the escapees -- Gainey, Eric Buras and Gary “Fuzzy” Slaydon -- were captured hours after they hit the woods about 100 yards away from the jail. Timothy Murray was caught a few days later.
“I do not aim to make this anyone’s fault other than my own,” Strain said at a news conference in the jail Thursday. “This happened on my watch.”
The four men are now back in the jail, each in solitary confinement cells without windows, Warden Greg Longino said.
The men had been working for about a year on their plan to escape from the A200 pod near the rear of the jail complex on Champagne Drive in Covington, investigators said. They carefully removed the caulk around the shatterproof-glass window to gain access to eight metal bars that connected the window frame to the cinder blocks, Strain said.
Investigators believe the hacksaw blade was smuggled in by someone unaffiliated with the jail, but have not ruled out the possibility that a deputy or another inmate may have been involved.
After sawing through the bars, the inmates were able to pull the window from the wall, popping it loose from 20 screws that held it in place, Strain said. The screws used to hold the frame in place should have been twice as long and wide as the ones actually used in the jail, which barely held the window at all, he said.
“Had the screws not failed, they’d still be there today,” Strain said.
Though the jail’s use of the wrong screws was the “fatal flaw” that allowed the inmates to escape, another mistake aided their efforts. The space between the metal frame of the window and the cinder-block walls was empty, but should have been filled with cement that would have blocked access to the metal bars that held the frame in place, Strain said.
It is unclear if these flaws were mistakes in the design or in the construction of the jail, Strain said. The jail contains about 100 windows with the same design as the one in Gainey’s cell, and workers were on the jail grounds Thursday to add about 90 pounds of cement around each frame and replace the screws in each window.
It is unclear whether Gainey came up with the escape idea or if the four men, who were described as friends, chose his cell because two large pillars hide it from the deputies watching the 30 prisoners in the pod.
It is unclear whether the four inmates knew about the flaws in the windows or if they just got lucky, Strain said.
Buras, of Alabama, is awaiting trial in the killing of Katie Wilkerson, 19, whose bound and gagged body was found in the Pearl River near Interstate 59. Murray, of North Carolina, is awaiting trial in the killing of Slidell-area tree-cutter Carl Glass Jr. during a robbery. Slaydon is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of trying to murder his neighbor during a robbery.
The jail’s single guard tower is typically empty when prisoners are not using the yard, Strain said.
The sheriff outlined the flaws in the jail windows in a letter to the Louisiana Sheriffs Association, with the intention of alerting other law enforcement agencies about potential problems with their jails. Strain said Thursday that similar-style windows are used in so-called Supermax prisons, typically used by federal agencies to hold their most dangerous inmates.
While he said he has heard of no other jail with similar problems, Strain said he hopes other agencies are looking into the issue.
“I hope sheriffs around the country are inspecting their jails,” he said.
Copyright 2009 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company