New York – A worker at an Upstate New York maximum-security prison charged with helping two convicted killers escape last weekend brought the men hacksaw blades, chisels, a punch and a screwdriver bit, according to criminal complaints.
Prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell, 51, was arraigned late Friday night on the felony charge of promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor count of criminal facilitation. Her lawyer, Keith Bruno, entered a not guilty plea on her behalf.
Mitchell is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and giving them contraband. The inmates used power tools to cut through their cell walls and a steam pipe and escaped through a manhole a week ago.
The hacksaw blades and other items given to the inmates had been purchased recently over several months, according to law enforcement sources,CNN reported.
Wearing a green short-sleeved top and jeans, Mitchell entered the courtroom with her hands cuffed in front of her. She looked scared and said little. She was ordered held in jail on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 bond on felony count and is due back in court Monday morning.
She lowered her head when she heard the amount for the felony bail and only said “yes” when asked about her name, ABC News reported.
If convicted, she faces up to eight years in prison.
The allegations about the hacksaw blades and other tools are contained in court documents filed Friday in Clinton County Court. Mitchell brought contraband into the prison at around noon on May 1, the criminal complaints state, NBC News reported.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier the contraband didn’t include power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.
More than 800 law enforcement officers continued to search for the escapees, concentrating in a rural area around the prison in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Earlier residents reported seeing two men jumping a stone wall outside Dannemora.
Mitchell’s family has said she wouldn’t have helped the convicts break out.
An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell is also suspected of agreeing to be a getaway driver but didn’t show up, leaving the men on foot early last Saturday morning.
Mitchell has a job with a yearly salary of $57,697, overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison. Amid the criminal case, she was suspended without pay.
Within the past year, officials looked into whether Mitchell had improper ties to the 34-year-old Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff’s deputy, Wylie said. He gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship.
The investigation didn’t turn up anything solid enough to warrant disciplinary charges against her, the district attorney said.
Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt’s 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river.
A former slipper-factory employee who won three terms as tax collector in her town near Dannemora, Mitchell has worked at the prison for at least five years, according to a neighbor, Sharon Currier. Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, also works in industrial training there.
The garment shop is intended to give prisoners job skills and work habits. In general, an inmate assigned to such a job might work several hours a day there, five days a week, meaning he would have significant contact with supervisors.
Mitchell’s union, Civil Service Employees Association Local 1000, would not comment Friday on the investigation of Mitchell or the current allegations.
As reported by Vos Iz Neias