Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 31, 1994 TAG: 9405310077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOYDTON LENGTH: Medium
The group had overpowered guards one by one inside their death row cellblocks and stolen six uniforms. They bluffed their way out the door with the cooperation of prison employees who believed the six were fellow officers frantically trying to dispose of a bomb.
"It was terribly embarrassing," said Carl K. Hester, assistant warden at Mecklenburg Correctional Center. "We have done all we could to ensure nothing like that ever happened again."
A decade later, five of the escapees are dead. But the breakout still haunts Mecklenburg, even though employees there rarely mention it.
"You don't ever get over it," said Prince A. Thomas Jr., one of 14 prison employees taken hostage. Thomas was stripped and bound, then locked in a cell.
Thomas suffered stress and emotional problems after the escape, and was out of work for several months, he said.
He now patrols the 20-foot fences topped with razor wire that surround the maximum-security prison and has little contact with death row or its inmates.
The inmates had secreted homemade knives in cracks in their cell walls, then painted over the cracks. Over months they listened to the guards' conversations over an intercom system, noting assignments, names and shift changes.
No one noticed when, after an evening recreation period, inmate Earl Clanton hid in a bathroom instead of returning to his cell. About 8:30, Clanton emerged and overpowered a lone guard in the cellblock's control room.
He released the others, and for more than 90 minutes the group held the building hostage.
No one outside the death row building knew anything was amiss. About 10:30, the group forced a hostage to radio an emergency call. There was a bomb on death row and the guard would need a prison van immediately to remove it, the guard said.
The six donned riot gear and ran from the building, pretending to douse the bomb - actually a camouflaged television - with fire extinguishers. They jumped into the waiting van and disappeared into the hot, late spring night. It was close to a half-hour later when prison officials discovered the ruse.
"It was a freak happening," said Jerry Davis, records manager at the prison. He is one of only a few senior prison officials who remain - most were transferred after the escape.
"They walked out, they did not break out. You have to remember that. It took human error for them to escape," Davis said.
The escape terrified prison employees and residents of this rural tobacco farming area near the North Carolina line, where the prison represents welcome employment but also makes an unsettling neighbor.
The escape was engineered by a pair of Richmond brothers - James and Linwood Briley - whose cunning and violence were notorious.
The brothers were the last of the six escapees caught. It took hundreds of law enforcement officials from several states almost three weeks to track the pair down in Philadelphia. In the end, the state hired a bounty hunter to help locate the Brileys.
by CNB