A dangerous inmate who successfully escaped from a Missouri prison explained how he did it in a Tuesday interview.
“Those were the best four days of my life,” LuJuan Tucker told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an interview about the escape. “I know it’s sad to say. I hadn’t been on the streets in 20 years.”
A couple of years before Tucker’s escape, a pair of inmates were able to leave the facility by exploiting a vulnerability within a metal sink and toilet assembly in a certain cell, per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Tucker and four other inmates mirrored a similar escape plan.
“The jail was lazy,” Tucker told the local outlet. “They never fixed the cell.”
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Tucker and the inmates reportedly broke into the locked cell using a plastic tool and chipped away at a brick located near the lock in the door leading to the roof. When this didn’t work, Tucker used a bunk bed leg as a lever and pried the door open. (RELATED: Prisoner Escapes Hospital Through 5th Floor Window Into Getaway Taxi, Police Say)
“When you are an inmate and have nothing but time, you can do some pretty impossible things,” Chief Deputy Greg Armstrong of the St. Francois County Sheriff’s Department told St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Before the nightly 10 p.m. headcount, the escapees used a ladder construction workers would use to get down from the roof and replaced their prison uniforms with regular clothes hiding underneath, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted. The group reportedly ran to a secure lot a mile away and found a 2009 Scion TC with the keys in it, plenty of gas, electronic devices and miscellaneous items that could be sold along the way.
Ohio State troopers pulled the car over for a traffic violation and the fugitives pretended to look for their IDs before speeding off. Law enforcement caught the group after a couple of hours.
“Security cameras are great, but you have to have somebody watching them,” he continued. “We simply don’t have the staff to have one person to sit and watch cameras for eight hours a shift.”