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Questions linger over Texas prisoner’s fast, daring escape

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Investigators are looking into the possibility that Barnes, 21, staged the prison fight that sent him to the UTMB hospital for treatment. (Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice photo)

By Harvey Rice
Houston Chronicle

GALVESTON, Texas — In a daring escape, state prison inmate Joshua Duane Barnes gouged a hole through a wall big enough to crawl through, broke a window, tied 40 feet of bedsheets together and descended from the seventh-story window of a prison hospital in all of 15 minutes.

Now the Inspector General’s Office of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is investigating how Barnes, 21, of Amarillo, escaped in that short time frame from a secure prison hospital on the University of Texas Medical Branch campus in Galveston last weekend.

Barnes, who was in prison on seven burglary charges and assault with a deadly weapon, was still at large late Tuesday.

Read the full story here.

Watch a video showing how Barnes was able to escape here.