Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Peoria's Jailbreakers Now Caught

We just got the call that the inmates that escaped from the Peoria County Jail yesterday are now both in custody. I know there are a lot of Peoria Ladies that will breath just a little easier tonight.
This was taken off the news website: The Peoria County Sheriff says both inmates who escaped from the Peoria County Jail are back in custody.
Sheriff Mike McCoy says 44-year-old James Fuller, the last inmate on the loose, was found at 2114 N. North Street in Peoria around 1:30 Wednesday.
Fuller and 28-year-old Aaron Cook were last accounted for around 8 p.m. Monday and discovered missing during breakfast at the jail around 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Cook was captured around 2:40 Tuesday afternoon at 620 Spitznagel Street. Police say he was found under a pile of boxes wearing sweats, not his jail issued uniform.
On Tuesday afternoon, Fuller is believed to have broken into a home, tied up a man and locked him in a bathroom before stealing an SUV from the home in the North Valley. The vehicle later was located in the parking lot of Woodruff High School about a mile from where it was stolen.
Later, authorities viewed a District 150 security video showing Fuller get out of the SUV in the Woodruff parking lot Tuesday afternoon.
K-9 units tracked Fuller’s scent to the edge of Woodruff’s baseball field, and homes — many vacant — and garages were searched, McCoy said.
McCoy was not sure how the men got to the North Valley neighborhood where Cook was found and where Fuller allegedly stole the SUV, but it is more than 10 miles from the jail. He would not say how they are believed to have covered that distance, or how both men got street clothes to replace their prison garb with black and white stripes.
James E. Fuller, 44, was taken into custody by police about 1:35 p.m. Wednesday.
This is more on how they escaped:
After Cook was apprehended, he told detectives that he and Fuller tied a rope made of bedsheets to a drain pipe on the jail roof but decided it wouldn’t hold them. They instead jumped from the roof onto the ground and fled, McCoy said.
“He said it wasn’t strong enough, so they jumped from the roof,” the sheriff said.
McCoy said Cook was expected to be interviewed again Wednesday to check his Tuesday explanations of the escape for consistency.
“The way they escaped and kept (the hole they dug into the roof) hid, it was pretty ingenious,” McCoy said. “But once they got off that wall (of the jail), their plan hit a snag.”
McCoy said interviews with Cook revealed that Fuller had been working for more than a year on an escape route through the ceiling and roof above his cell. Cook admitted to being involved for about the past four months, McCoy said.
Somehow, Fuller accessed metal pieces to help him dig, which McCoy said were not smuggled into the jail. McCoy said they were taken from items within the cell, although he declined to identify what they were pulled from or how it was done.
Using the metal pieces, Fuller cut a hole through the ceiling to gain access to concrete blocks leading to the roof. Gradually, Fuller used the metal pieces to pick away at the concrete. When not working, he apparently placed the cut-away piece of ceiling back in its place.
Cook somehow hid in Fuller’s cell when the jail was locked down for the night at 8 p.m. Monday. McCoy did not say how that was accomplished.

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