Escapees

Two teen-age sex offenders were back in custody yesterday after escaping from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County, officials said. The offenders, 17 and 19 years old, escaped about 7 p.m. Wednesday, said Lee Towers, spokesman for Maryland's Department of Juvenile Justice. He said the teens were dressed in street clothes. A guard, apparently believing they were employees, opened the gate and let them pass. The two were being held at a 26-bed facility for sex offenders run by the Chesapeake Center that is housed on the Hickey grounds.

The man who escaped from a Baltimore jail last week has been captured in western Pennsylvania, a state official said. The U.S. Marshals Service took Maury Figueroa, 29, into custody without incident, said Mark A. Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, in a Friday statement. Figueroa escaped from Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center on Nov. 9. He escaped while working on a sanitation detail and climbed a fence in an employee parking lot, officials said.

Two men who escaped from the Eastern Pre-Release Unit in Queen Anne's County in June were arrested yesterday morning by state police in North East.John Lewis Williams, 30, and John Edward Perry, 29, were picked up from a house after a source told police where they were. The two men were taken to the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, where they will face escape charges, said Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Sergeant Shipley said Williams had been in prison since 1984, serving 15 years for second-degree rape and robbery.

An article in the June 24, 1911 edition of The Argus reported on the safe return of a state mental hospital patient who said he had made his way across town to visit family members. John Leubecker , aged 46 years, an escaped inmate of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane at Catonsville, who terrorized the residents along Gridon avenue, Lauraville, Monday night, was captured shortly before 3 o'clock Tuesday afternoon at the home of his stepdaughter, Mrs. Henry Peper , on the Philadelphia road near Rossville.

An Edgewood boarding house operator with a shotgun captured one of 11 escapees from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for juvenile offenders yesterday as police in cars, on foot and in a helicopter closed in on the youth after a five-mile chase.Police arrested another Hickey fugitive in a relative's home in Chase, leaving only one of the escapees from last week's breakout at large."I didn't know whether it was a murderer, or what," Dewey Nichols said last night after he had apprehended the exhausted youth in a field behind the boarding house and turned him over to police.

IRVING, Texas - Up in Colorado, they're calling it the "Texas Lottery" - the half-million-dollar reward for the captured escapees. At least four tipsters appear to be eligible, but they may have to wait a while. Most of the organizations that are offering the reward money say they will wait for the Irving Police Department to determine who will receive it. An Irving police officer was slain on Christmas Eve, and one of the escapees is suspected. "That's something we won't be able to get to until further in the case," police spokesman David Tull said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Spurred by new information from a former inmate, the U.S. Marshal's Service has revived its hunt for three bank robbers who escaped from the notorious Alcatraz Island penitentiary in 1962 and were presumed drowned or eaten by sharks.Former convict Thomas Kent, interviewed for an episode of "America's Most Wanted" airing later this month, provides "significant new leads" in the remarkable escape, the subject of a popular Clint Eastwood movie, a spokesman for the Marshal's Service said yesterday.

Seven juvenile offenders remained on the run last night after an escape from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County, where 11 teen-agers overpowered staff members and broke out of their detention unit yesterday.The youths, ranging in age from 15 to 18, pushed a male staff member, took his keys and grabbed a phone from a female staffer trying to call for help, said Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, a state police spokesman.Police said the teen-agers were at the school for juvenile delinquents for offenses including auto theft, armed robbery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and kidnapping.

In the wake of an embarrassing escape by two felons this week, top prison officials are blaming lax security and said yesterday that negligent corrections officers failed to notice the breach quickly enough and then were tardy in their reaction.Corrections officers were not aware that anything was amiss at the Maryland Correctional Institution until a woman called to say her son had seen two men jump over the fence and flee into nearby woods.A motion detector sounded as the escapees scaled the fence, but the guards monitoring it were slow to respond.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - Four Arab escapees believed to be members of al-Qaida eluded a U.S. military dragnet for a second day yesterday as Islamic extremists celebrated the breakout from a detention center here as proof of American weakness. U.S. and allied Afghan troops backed by Apache helicopter gunships set up checkpoints and searched villages that surround the Bagram airbase, about 25 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The base houses the detention center where several hundred suspected militants are held and serves as the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

A man who wriggled out of handcuffs and escaped from Baltimore police took a 2,780-mile trek across America in a silver Kia Spectra with a bent frame before being captured in a parking lot of a small prairie town in Washington state, authorities said Thursday. Acting on a tip from Baltimore, members of the U.S. Marshals Service swooped in Wednesday evening on the banged-up car in Yelm, Wash., a town of about 5,400 west of Mount Rainier and first settled along a wagon road and Indian trail in 1883.

Typically, prisoners who are on work release get to leave the inside of the jail to work outside the fence, and then must return. David Newton, on home detention awaiting trial on drug and burglary charges, had an opposite course. He would leave his home to go to work inside the jail, and would then return to his house at the end of the day, as a condition of his pre-trial release. So prison officials were perplexed Wednesday afternoon when they said the 19-year-old Newton, who was not cuffed or shackled, ran from correctional officers who were escorting him to the laundry room at the Baltimore City Detention Center.

Baltimore County and Maryland State police are searching for two juveniles who escaped from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School on Sunday night. The juveniles were reported missing from the Baltimore County detention facility at around 8:45 p.m., but had escaped at around 8:25 p.m., said Cpl. David Hooper, of the Maryland State Police Golden Ring Barrack. Hooper said the juveniles escaped by climbing the fence of the facility, and had not been located as of 10 p.m. Sunday. Hooper said K-9 and aerial units were also being used to locate the juveniles.

Thirty-four years after he was shot by Baltimore police for swinging a hatchet at an officer, a 62-year-old city man has died as a result of his wounds, according to police and the medical examiner's office. Police said James Cornelius Watkins died March 12 at Northwest Hospital Center from sepsis. He had been paralyzed and held at a care facility since he was shot Dec. 3, 1975, after escaping from a prison work crew and committing a home invasion. According to reports from the time, he lunged at an officer and was shot in the chest.

A week after authorities say a 20-year-old thief slipped his handcuffs around a Howard County deputy's neck and managed to escape, he was tracked down in Virginia, hiding in a hollowed-out basement wall in a house on the outskirts of Richmond. It was the latest twist for Devin Champagne, a Jessup man who had been on the run since his conviction Aug. 13 for first-degree theft, with his capture involving about 100 officers - from the U.S. Marshals Service, Maryland State Police and local police and deputies in Maryland and Virginia.

One of 2 prison escapees recaptured on Shore Authorities yesterday captured one of two inmates who walked away from an Eastern Shore correctional facility Wednesday evening. The second escapee was still at large yesterday evening. James Allen Cramer, 52, was arrested about 3 p.m. by the Queen Anne's County Sheriff's Office at an undisclosed location. Authorities said an anonymous tipster aided police in Cramer's apprehension. Police were still searching for Billy Gene Dolly, 41. He was described as a white male, 5-foot-6 and 160 pounds.

HOUSTON - A shrewd, well-organized master criminal appears to be the leader of seven escaped Texas prisoners suspected of killing a policeman, authorities said Thursday - and they fear the escapees might be planning a violent showdown with police. A Christmas Eve robbery in Irving, in which Officer Aubrey Hawkins was slain, bore marked similarities to the El Paso robberies that landed escapee George Rivas in jail in 1994. Rivas, 34, whom El Paso prosecutor Marcos Lizarraga once called "the most dangerous man in Texas," had led a group of thugs posing as security guards in at least a half-dozen robberies.

Three teenagers escaped Sunday from the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County, and police were still searching for two of them yesterday. The Maryland State Police, which investigates incidents at juvenile facilities, said Tyrone Johnson, 18, of Baltimore and Demarco Smith, 18, of Washington are being charged as adults with escape. The third, a 17-year-old from Baltimore, was arrested Monday by Maryland Transit Authority Police in Baltimore County, state police said. That teen, who was not identified by Juvenile Services or state police, had been held at Cheltenham on charges of assault and robbery, said Tammy Brown, a spokeswoman for the Department of Juvenile Services, which operates Cheltenham.

A man committed to the Rosewood Center after being found incompetent to stand trial on a murder charge escaped this week and made it to New Hampshire before police found and arrested him early yesterday. And it wasn't the first time that Thurman Wilson, 25, got out of the Owings Mills facility for the developmentally disabled. After Wilson escaped five years ago, state officials responded with a plan to move court-committed Rosewood residents to a more secure facility. But the plan was delayed, and Wilson, who was charged with another teenager in the killing of a Prince George's cabdriver, was returned to Rosewood.