Last week, police were searching for two ‘very dangerous’ inmates of a Florida prison who escaped on October 24th.
Officials realized that Rondell Reed and Leviticus Taylor were missing from their shared cell during a routine headcount, shortly before 5 a.m.
The prison immediately went into lockdown and officials later found the inmate’s red prison jumpsuits during a search of the jail.
Leviticus Uriah Taylor, 25, was caught on that same evening after a sheriff’s deputy spotted him walking down a road.
“When the agent asked if he was Taylor, he said, ‘It’s me.’ And there was no struggle at all. He had presumably been out all night and was wanting to come in,” Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar said.
Loar added that two women who he said had confessed to aiding in the escape effort are now in custody. The women — 19-year-old Sadie Welker, who said she was Taylor’s girlfriend, and Angela Pike, 35 — were arrested on charges of aiding an escaped inmate and are being held on $100,000 bonds.
The second escapee, Rondell Reed, was captured last Saturday morning north of Cincinnati Ohio.
According to a Warren County Sheriff’s Office news release, a deputy tried to stop a suspected impaired driver who was northbound on Interstate 75 in Franklin Township. The deputy had been notified a few minutes earlier that the vehicle, a Lincoln MKX with Georgia registration, had been reported stolen in Georgia.
When the deputy tried to stop the car, the driver crossed the grass median and began driving south on I-75 at close to 100 miles per hour. When the driver of the vehicle tried to get off at the State Route 63 exit, he hit a pole and crashed.
Reed had to be extricated from the vehicle and taken to Atrium Medical Center, where he was treated and released a short time later.
Loar described the escape plan as elaborate and said the inmates made use of the jail’s air conditioning system to get out of the building and used clothing or blankets to help scale multiple razor-wire-topped fences.
Welker told investigators she had discussed the escape plan with Taylor numerous times and had waited at a planned rendezvous point for three nights before the inmates finally made their break, her arrest affidavit said.
Taylor was scheduled to be sentenced on November 10 for his first-degree murder conviction in the 2009 killing of a man in the course of a home burglary. Reed was awaiting trial over the killing of his sister’s boyfriend.
