Over the weekend, law enforcement officials had swarmed New York’s Allegany County, near the Pennsylvania border – more than 300 miles away from the prison – after receiving a tip from someone who reported seeing two men on a railroad track in the town of Friendship who looked like Matt and Sweat.
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Still, state police said in a news release late Sunday that though they will continue to respond to reports of sightings, a “primary focus of the search continues to be in the Dannemora area”, close to Clinton Correctional.
Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility and have traveled nearly 359 miles to the Pennsylvania state line. Reuter’s pic The Buffalo News reported that a civilian told police that he believed he had seen two men fitting the descriptions of the convicts walking along a road in Friendship yesterday morning.
Authorities said they have deployed special operations teams, officers with dogs and helicopters in the search for the two escapees, Richard Matt and David Sweat.
Mitchell, a prison tailor shop instructor, is accused of helping them by supplying tools like chisels and drill bits. The U.S. Marshals Service has placed Sweat and Matt on its 15 Most Wanted Fugitives List and is offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the capture of either suspect, police said.
“They are probably thinking, ‘We have nothing, maybe they need to entice a small more, ‘” he said.
Both escapees are considered extremely unsafe.
A figure was seen running through the woods near the secluded village of Owl’s Head in New York State shortly after a hunting cabin was burgled. Matt, 48, was in prison for the kidnapping, kill and dismemberment of a man who had fired him from his job at a food warehouse.
The two inmates cut through their cell walls and crawled through a steam pipe before emerging from a manhole outside the prison, authorities said. Sweat was serving a life sentence after he was convicted of killing a Broome County sheriff’s deputy in 2002.
New York State Police Major Michael Ceretto, who directed the manhunt in the city and its surroundings, has declared that the search and investigation will be continued until all possible leads in Friendship and its surroundings will be checked. Mitchell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Citing a person the paper familiar with the investigation, shown the news that the based on evidence that at least one of the men had broken into a home in the area of east of the Titusville Mountain State Forest Owls Head.
The two men escaped from the maximum-security prison, near the Canadian border, on June 6.
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