DANNEMORA, N.Y. (AP) — A prison employee being questioned about her suspected role in the escape of two murderers provided them with contraband before they broke out, a prosecutor said Friday.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie would not specify the illegal items that Joyce Mitchell allegedly supplied, but said they weren’t the power tools that David Sweat and Richard Matt used to cut their way out of the maximum-security institution last weekend.
Wylie said items considered contraband can include such things as toothpaste or drugs.
Mitchell has not been charged. A son told NBC earlier this week that she would not have helped the inmates escape and that she checked herself into a hospital with chest pains Saturday, the day the breakout was discovered.
On Thursday, a person close to the investigation said that Mitchell — an instructor at the prison tailor shop, where the two convicts worked — had befriended them and agreed to be the getaway driver, but never showed up. The person was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, cut through steel and bricks and crawled through a steam pipe, emerging from a manhole outside the 40-foot walls of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border.
About 500 state, federal and local law enforcement officers Friday began a seventh day of trying to track down the convicts, with search teams slogging up to their knees through swamps and streams swarming with bloodsucking insects. Local schools and the main road into Dannemora remained closed for a second day.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that investigators are “talking to several people who may have facilitated the escape.” He warned that the law will come down hard on any prison system employee who crosses the line.
“If you do it, you will be convicted, and then you’ll be on the other side of the prison that you’ve been policing, and that is not a pleasant place to be,” the governor said.
A longtime neighbor was stunned by the suspicions swirling around Mitchell.
“I just can’t believe she’d do something so stupid,” neighbor Sharon Currier said. She said Mitchell is “not somebody who’s off the wall.”
She said Mitchell is a former town tax collector in Dickinson, a community near Dannemora. Skilled at sewing, she has worked for at least five years at the prison, where her husband is also employed, Currier said.
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(Photo Source: AP)
