SOMERVILLE — A five-day, round-the-clock manhunt for a potentially dangerous federal fugitive who made a brazen escape from a Rhode Island detention center ended Thursday with a foot chase in Somerville, where a veteran state trooper snared James W. Morales as he tried to jump a fence in the Ten Hills neighborhood.
The 114-hour search, which began when Morales was discovered missing during a New Year’s Eve head count at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, came to a dramatic end around 4 p.m.
Trooper Joseph Merrick, responding to a report of an attempted bank robbery nearby, spotted Morales walking near McGrath Highway and Mystic Avenue, sparking a two-block chase that ended on Wheatland Street, officials said.
Morales hopped a fence with Merrick in pursuit and ran toward Wheatland Street, where he briefly avoided detection by hiding under a porch, State Police Colonel Richard McKeon said at a Thursday evening press briefing.
But he then tried to climb another fence, and Merrick pounced, grabbing hold of him as he was at the top of the fence and tackling him to the ground.
“After a foot chase, a couple fences, I was able to get him into custody” with the help of a fellow trooper and two Somerville detectives, Merrick said during the briefing held at the State Police barracks in Medford. “It was a great job by everybody.”
Supervisory Deputy US Marshal Kevin Neal said Morales will be in federal court in Providence Friday for an initial appearance on an escape charge.
Authorities did not discuss any additional charges he might face or say where he will be held overnight.
The capture of a man wanted in two states shocked local residents of the densely packed street.
The map below shows the area where Morales was found and captured:
Arjun Poudel, 45, was eating when he looked out the window and saw Morales being chased by an officer. Morales ran beside his house, shedding a black jacket, before moving to a next door neighbor’s backyard, Poudel said.
“It’s kind of scary because I have a couple of daughters,” said Poudel, 45, who said he was eating with his wife. “He might have tried to enter my house.”
Authorities, during the press briefing, laid out a timeline of the events leading to Morales’s capture.
FBI Special Agent Hank Shaw, head of the bureau’s Boston office, said a man later identified as Morales tried to rob a Bank of America branch on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge just after 9:20 a.m.
He said authorities tracked “a number of leads” throughout the day.
Around 3:20 p.m., Shaw said, Morales tried to rob a second bank, this time a Citizens branch at 338 Broadway in Somerville, leading to the initial encounter between Merrick and Morales about 20 minutes later.
McKeon said that before Morales was caught, he ditched a motorcycle helmet, gloves, and a fanny pack, and that investigators were processing those items Thursday night.
Somerville and Cambridge had been on alert all day, attuned to the sound of helicopters overhead and the sight of police searching everywhere from bustling Central Square to the quiet marsh around Alewife Station, after a man who matched Morales’s description — but with a scarf and hoodie obscuring the distinctive eagle tattoo on his neck — attempted the first bank robbery in Cambridge.
At 9:21 a.m., a suspect police described as a black male, wearing a scarf, a knit cap, and a black jacket over a gray hoodie, tried to rob the Central Square Bank of America branch by passing a note to a teller but escaped without any money. Photos quickly released by the FBI showed a man who closely resembled the 35-year-old Morales.
Somerville schools canceled outdoor activities for the rest of the day as a precaution.
Juliana Rivera, 15, who said word of the fugitive dominated discussion at school, arrived home to Wheatland Street to find a crush of cruisers coming both ways down the one-way street, and the sight of one officer sliding across the back of a parked car as he joined the fast-paced pursuit.
“Everyone was just running,” said Rivera, who did not see Morales in the chase. “I was super scared.”
Morales, a former Army Reserve medical logistics specialist, was being held in Rhode Island while awaiting trial for allegedly breaking into a Worcester armory in 2015 and cutting through the ceiling of a weapons vault to steal six assault rifles and 10 semiautomatic pistols. At the time, he was wearing a GPS monitoring bracelet while awaiting trial on child-rape charges that originated in Cambridge.
His escape came less than three weeks after a Dorchester couple pleaded guilty to being Morales’s co-conspirators, helping to store and sell some of the weapons and mislead the FBI.
Morales, who has ties to Cambridge and Framingham as well as New York City, reportedly escaped from the Wyatt facility — a privately run jail for federal detainees in Central Falls — by climbing a basketball hoop in the exercise yard and cutting and climbing through layers of razor-wire fencing around 7 p.m. last Saturday, about three hours before corrections officers noticed he was missing.
He then crossed the border into Massachusetts and stole a car in nearby Attleboro, sparking what the US Marshals Service called a “large-scale, around-the-clock . . . manhunt.”
It is unclear how Morales, who earlier this week was spotted in Framingham, ended up in Cambridge and Somerville.
Public records show Morales worked for a few months for both the Cambridge Housing Authority and the Cambridge Department of Public Works as a maintenance worker and laborer in 2013.
For a brief time, Morales lived at Central House, a 128-unit substance-free community, an employee said. The residence is near the Bank of America branch Morales allegedly attempted to rob Thursday.
According to court records, Morales also served probation on a 2013 Cambridge aggravated assault and battery case.
In Rhode Island Thursday evening, the chairman of the detention-center board called the escape “wholly and entirely unacceptable and inexcusable” and said the board has instructed Wyatt’s warden to conduct a complete review of the facility, including interviewing every officer and detainee.
Mike Bello and Andy Rosen of the Globe staff and correspondent Reenat Sinay contributed to this report.