Updated: 0.43 am
POLICE HAVE SHOT dead a convicted killer who escaped from a maximum security prison almost three weeks ago, according to reports in the US tonight.
U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, who was briefed by the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Marshals Service, said Richard Matt was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent from Vermont.
Officers are trucking in floodlights to where David Sweat is believed to be hiding, not far from where Matt was killed.
Schumer said searchers closed in on the pair after receiving a 911 call from a woman who heard a knock on her door early today in Malone, which is about 30 miles west of the Clinton Correctional Facility.
She didn’t answer the door, but she called the police. They brought the dogs, and they got a scent.
They followed that scent and put out a lot of troops around the cabin. They came upon him and found him and killed him.
Schumer said at least one of the prisoners was armed. State police said law enforcement spotted Matt at around 3:45 p.m.
Matt and fellow convicted murderer David Sweat broke out of the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, 30 miles east of Malone on 6 June.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says Matt and Sweat used power tools to saw through a steel cell wall and several steel steam pipes, bashed a hole through a 2-foot-thick brick wall, squirmed through pipes and escaped.
Sweat was serving a sentence of life without parole in the killing of a sheriff’s deputy in Broome County in 2002.
Matt was serving 25 years to life for the killing and dismembering of his former boss.
Prosecutors said Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who got close to the men while working with them, had agreed to be their getaway driver.
However, she backed out because she felt guilty for participating. Mitchell pleaded not guilty on 15 June to charges including felony promoting prison contraband.
Authorities said Matt and Sweat had filled their beds in their adjacent cells with clothes, to make it appear they were sleeping when guards made overnight rounds.
On a cut steam pipe, the prisoners left a taunting note containing a crude caricature of an Asian face and the words “Have a nice day.”
Originally published: 10.17 pm
Contains reporting by the Associated Press.
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