Tip results in escape being stopped

Thursday, March 9th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKEMAH, Okla. (AP) -- Okfuskee County sheriff's deputies acting on a tip found that a dozen jail inmates had been tunneling through a wall and hiding their work by building a fake wall.

Sheriff Charles Shepard said deputies were tipped off to suspicious activity near the inmate shower. A check Tuesday showed that the inmates in a nearby cell had removed bricks and mortar from an interior wall and were working to loosen the outside granite blocks that were used to construct the building in 1926.

The hole in the wall was near a window that had been covered with sheet steel. Once the wall was chipped away, the prisoners were able to pry back the steel. The old window also had bars, but they were loose and easily removable, Shepard said Wednesday.

The mortar holding the inside bricks and the outside walls is so deteriorated that it flakes away easily. He said the inmates would have had no trouble dislodging several of the outside blocks and escaping from the fifth-floor jail.

Shepard said the inmates used a stiff, reinforced wire, which apparently came from the wall itself, along with a sharp piece of rusty metal from a cot and a 31/2-foot-long piece of lumber to tear away the wall.

The prisoners then used cardboard with paper towels pasted to it with toothpaste to conceal the opening they made in an area behind their cell.

The sheriff said the only way to stop similar escape attempts such is to either remodel the old jail or build a new facility. "There is no way we can prevent this type of thing from happening with the current facilities," Shepard said Wednesday. "If a prisoner is really determined to escape, he can do it, unless we catch him before he can actually get out, like we did this time."