By Katie Kull
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Early Sunday, guards at the downtown St. Louis jail heard a commotion in a room reserved for detainees making phone calls.
They arrived and saw a pair of legs slipping into the ceiling, the city’s top jail official said in an interview Tuesday.
Maurio Thomas, 29, spent the next 20 minutes stumbling through a maze in the City Justice Center ceiling. His small stature and athletic build made him unusually fit to navigate the tight space, said city Public Safety Director Shawn Dace.
And none of the alarms fastened in the ceiling sounded.
“It was a perfect storm,” Dace said.
Then Thomas, in jail on charges he twice broke into a woman’s home and sexually assaulted her, slipped out a back door.
Hours later, police arrested Thomas near Tesson Ferry Road and Heritage Drive in Affton. His escape raises questions about security at a facility that in recent years has come under fire for a string of detainee deaths, allegations of inadequate medical care — and for faulty locks that have allowed inmates to get out of their cells.
Dace maintained Tuesday that the city has made strides in hiring, employee training and detainee welfare. He said he hoped the incident would not overshadow that progress.
“This is a one-off,” he said. “We are embarrassed about what transpired this weekend, and we take full responsibility.”
The last time a detainee escaped from the City Justice Center on Tucker Boulevard was in 2011.
A couple of men awaiting trial on assault charges propped a gurney against a wall in the jail’s infirmary, climbed through the ceiling and busted out through a giant window.
They then scaled the glass facade using bedsheets and jumped down about 25 feet onto Tucker.
Hours later, both men were arrested. One had broken a leg.
Then-Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff blamed one “knuckleheaded corrections officer” who failed to investigate noises coming from the infirmary.
Dace, in his interview Tuesday, similarly blamed jail guards for failing to keep watch on Thomas. That night, Dace said, jail staff were helping manage a handful of inmates who had been hospitalized for various conditions.
“We should not have let him come out and make a phone call,” Dace said. “That is the crux of the problem. We were short-staffed and there was not enough people to keep watch.”
To make matters worse, alarms designed to sound when people pass through different parts of the ceiling failed to go off, meaning that Thomas could pass through undetected, he said.
Dace said he did not believe Thomas knew the way out. Dace himself crawled into the ceiling in an effort to replicate Thomas’ route.
“I think he just lucked his way through there,” he said.
Now, the jail is upgrading the alarms and will discipline the guards responsible for his escape.
Thomas waived an appearance in court on Tuesday and is being held without bond.
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