Here's how police are trying to track down two murderers who escaped from a maximum-security prison
Hundreds of officers from several agencies are fanning out across New York to track down the convicts.
Richard Matt, 48, was serving a sentence of 25 years to life for killing and dismembering his former boss in 1997. David Sweat, 34, was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff's deputy.
The pair reportedly escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility by using power tools to saw through a steel wall in their adjoining cells and cut holes into steam pipes they crawled through to make it to a manhole outside of prison walls.
Here's what we know about the search for Matt and Sweat:
- Authorities are zeroing in on the town of Willsboro, New York after getting reports of two suspicious individuals there, the New York Daily News reports. The town is about 40 miles south of the prison.
- Police are also looking into whether the duo could have escaped to Canada or Mexico.
- New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the inmates.
- More than 250 law enforcement and corrections officials had joined the search as of Sunday afternoon, according to the governor's office. This includes state police and special units. Forest rangers are leading a grid search of the ground, and a state police aviation unit is helping with an air search.
- Martin Horn, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, told Business Insider what this ground search might look like: "They do a circle, several miles in circumference around the area near the prison. They'll figure how far could the inmates have gotten and ... walk back in toward the prison and beat the bushes looking for the prisoners."
- Bloodhounds are being sent out into the woods to track the prisoners, according to NBC News.
- Police are going house-to-house doing checks in the area around the prison in upstate New York about 20 miles from the Canadian border.
- The mayor of Dannemora, where Clinton Correctional Facility is located, said there are roadblocks on "every corner and every road" out of the town and around the next-largest town 15 miles away, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- "Several busloads" of "heavily armed" corrections officers and cops have converged on Willsboro, according to the Daily News. State police are reportedly stopping traffic in and out of town.
- Police are also interviewing residents in Willsboro and checking fields, according to the Journal.