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N.Y. prison manhunt comes to end with escapee’s shooting

Manhunt ends three weeks after N.Y. prison break

Police stood over David Sweat after he was shot and captured near the Canadian border on Sunday.Associated Press

CONSTABLE, N.Y. — David Sweat, the remaining prison escapee on the run in northern New York, was shot by a state trooper and taken into custody Sunday in a rapid culmination to a sprawling 23-day manhunt that began with an improbable escape from two maximum-security prison cells and ended in the rain-drenched woods just south of the Canadian border.

Sweat, 35, a murderer who had been serving a sentence of life without parole, was in critical condition at Albany Medical Center late Sunday night, according to Dennis McKenna, the hospital’s medical director.

The shooting occurred in this town around 3:20 p.m. after Sergeant Jay Cook of the State Police spotted a man jogging down a road, stopped to question him, and recognized him as Sweat, Superintendent Joseph A. D’Amico of the New York State Police said.

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He told Sweat to come over to him but Sweat turned and fled across a field toward the tree line, D’Amico said. Cook, a firearms instructor who was patrolling by himself, gave chase and finally opened fire, striking Sweat twice in the torso, because he feared he might lose the fugitive in the woods, D’Amico said.

More than 1,300 officers in rain-slicked gear had helped to tighten a cordon around Sweat on Sunday as the search, which had at times appeared to lurch among small New York towns as officials chased shreds of reported sightings, focused in on 22 square miles of rugged terrain.

The confrontation with Sweat took place two days after his partner in flight from the authorities, Richard W. Matt, was shot and killed by a federal agent in the woods of Malone, N.Y.

“The nightmare is finally over,” said Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who spoke late Sunday surrounded by law enforcement officers at a news conference marked by cheers and applause. “These were really dangerous, dangerous men.”

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Sweat, who was spotted and captured within a few miles from the Canadian border, was unarmed and wearing mudstained and dark-colored clothes. He was taken to Alice Hyde Medical Center on Sunday and was being moved to Albany Medical Center for further treatment, D’Amico said.

Word of the manhunt’s end brought relief across this bucolic region, which had been in a near-constant state of alert as residents locked doors once left unsecured and cast a wary eye on every pair of men.

Escaped convict David Sweat.REUTERS/File

Denise Yando, who lives on a 30-acre property in Constable, said state troopers came to her home to say that Sweat had been shot in a nearby field.

“I suspected they would come toward Canada,” Yando said. “But I didn’t think it would happen in the field.”

The two escapees were both convicted murderers, with Matt serving a sentence of 25 years to life after being convicted in 2008 of murdering and dismembering a former boss. Before his trial, he served nine years in a Mexican prison for fatally stabbing a US engineer in a bar bathroom in Matamoros in 1998.

Sweat had been serving a sentence of life without parole for the July 4, 2002, killing of a Broome County sheriff’s deputy, Kevin J. Tarsia, after he came upon Sweat and two friends dividing up the spoils from the robbery of a fireworks and firearms store in Pennsylvania. Sweat shot him multiple times. While Tarsia was still alive, Sweat ran over him in his car.

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The final days of the search hewed closely to what had been, from the start, a Hollywood-style drama of ingenuity, flight, and violence.

The escape by Matt and Sweat from the Clinton Correctional Facility, discovered June 6, involved long-term planning, subterfuge, and trickery as the men cajoled favors and privileges from prison employees using flattery and, in Matt’s case, a talent for painting.

Their flight lasted longer than some law enforcement observers had expected, but the two convicted murderers appeared to have never made it more than a few dozen miles from their starting point: a manhole on a street in Dannemora, N.Y., mere steps from the high prison walls meant to contain them.

After a civilian prison employee, Joyce E. Mitchell, failed to meet them in her car, the two men, who displayed cunning inside the prison walls, were forced to run over tough terrain.

They found shelter in hunting cabins but left telltale clues of their presence that helped a vast array of agencies — from the State Police to the US Marshals to the FBI to state Forest Rangers — hone in on them over the last week.

Sunday’s confrontation with Sweat came two days after and roughly 15 miles north of the spot near Lake Titus where an agent from a tactical unit of the US Border and Customs Protection agency shot Matt three times in the head, according to an autopsy.

The agent, who was not named, opened fire after Matt, armed with a 20-gauge shotgun, did not put up his hands when ordered to do so.

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It was not clear whether the men had remained together the whole time, but they appeared to have been together recently enough that a discarded pepper shaker bearing Sweat’s DNA was found by investigators during the weekend near the spot where Matt was killed.

D’Amico, of the State Police, said the men possibly used the pepper to throw off the scent of the search dogs, a ruse employed in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke.”

“We did have difficulty tracking, so it was fairly effective in that respect,” he said.

Said Cuomo, speaking at a ski resort in Malone that has doubled as a command center, “If you were writing a movie plot, they would say that this was overdone.’’