New York prison break: police chase possible sightings as corrections officer stood down

Mesothelioma Survival Rates About 40 percent of patients with mesothelioma survive the first year after diagnosis. That survival rate depends on many factors, including age, cancer stage, cancer type, race and gender. Authorities announce Richard Matt and David Sweat may have been seen in Steuben county, while another jail employee faces investigation over escape

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york state police have revealed they are investigating a possible sighting of the two convicted killers who escaped from a maximum-security prison two weeks ago.

Police said on Friday night that two men fitting the description of inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt had been seen in Steuben county, New York, over 300 miles (483km) south-west of the prison in Dannemora. Two men were seen walking near a rail yard in Erwin on 13 June, and then the next day in Lindley heading toward the Pennsylvania border.

Investigators conducted interviews in both communities and surveillance video was being sent for analysis, a police statement said. It was not clear why authorities waited a week before divulging the information.

Sweat and Matt used power tools to cut their way out of Clinton correctional facility in Dannemora on 6 June. Hundreds of police officers have been looking for them.

Earlier on Friday night officials said a prison officer had been suspended over the escape of two inmates from the maximum security jail – becoming the second corrections employee under scrutiny in the case, following the arrest of Joyce Mitchell for allegedly assisting the pair.

“A correction officer was placed on administrative leave [on Friday evening] as part of the ongoing investigation into the escape at Clinton correctional facility,” the New York state corrections department said in a statement.

Mitchell, 51, an industrial training supervisor in the prison tailor shop, has pleaded not guilty to charges of promoting prison contraband and criminal facilitation. She is accused of supplying hacksaw blades and other tools to the escapees. If convicted she faces up to eight years in prison.

Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 35, broke through steel walls, slipped through a steam pipe and emerged from a manhole outside the 170-year-old prison, which is about 20 miles south of the Canadian border.

Joyce Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, has told authorities he was stunned when he was told by his wife when he visited her in custody that the inmates had talked about killing him as they plotted their escape. “He was just blown away by what was coming out,” said his lawyer, Peter Dumas, on NBC. “The fact that she told him that these two inmates had a plot to kill him. She also had told him that she was not in agreement with it, that she was getting threatened by the inmates at that point.”

New York state police and other law enforcement officers have expanded their search beyond the immediate vicinity of the prison, and have even included the US marshal’s service working along the border with Mexico, where Matt fled in a previous escape.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report