STEAK ESCAPE NASHVILLE TN DRIVER
After failing to halt another car by shooting out a tire, the escapees commandeered a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass, firing at the driver and a passenger as they ran for their lives across a field. While Douglas phoned for help, the convicts abandoned the Valiant and the terrified Demps, who ran to the church. Miraculously unhurt, Douglas floored his accelerator and careened eastward at 85 mph as the convicts pumped two. The second blew in a side rear window, spattering the upholstery and glove compartment with No. The first blast shattered the rear window of Douglas' sedan. One of the convicts tumbled out of the front seat clutching the guard's 12-gauge shotgun. When the car suddenly braked in front of the Salem Baptist Church, the unarmed Douglas lurched in front, blocking their escape route. Then, overtaking the convicts, for six miles he kissed bumpers with the Valiant, which was so encumbered with nine passengers that its axles nearly scraped the asphalt. The prisoners shoved Demps in the back seat with his wife and two children just as Douglas, the warden's assistant who was also driving to the race, passed the Valiant.ĭouglas did a double take and wheeled his car around to alert Fort Pillow, a whitewashed, three-story hive tucked among the cotton gins and Baptist steeples of west Tennessee. With two of the escapees dressed in the guards' clothes, the men scrambled out to Highway 87 and flagged down a 1973 Valiant driven by David Demps, who was on his way to run in a 10-kilometer race on the river bluffs. It's like the old saying that if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his behind when he hopped."Įyewitnesses, prison authorities and police in Tennessee and North Carolina sketch this account: "But, gee whiz, if anybody knows the answers, we're open for suggestions. "Somebody's going to take the heat for this and somebody's going to be the scapegoat," Wayne Douglas, administrative assistant to the Fort Pillow warden, said. The subsequent finger-pointing and recriminations across Tennessee have been nearly as turbulent as the escape itself.Īmong the questions being asked in two separate investigations: Why was a convicted killer with a history of escape attempts transferred last summer from the maximum-security penitentiary in Nashville to medium-security Fort Pillow? Does chronic overcrowding in Tennessee prisons and other penal institutions around the country contribute to escapes? (Fort Pillow has 835 inmates, nearly twice the number for which it was built in 1937.) Who's to blame?
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The other four convicts have been recaptured. The bloody spree that began that cold February morning has left, to date, three dead, including one of the escapees a state trooper critically wounded in a shootout, and 17 hostages seized in four incidents. Clegg, 30, serving a life term as a habitual offender Randolph Oliver, 33, serving six life sentences for rape and murder Riley Arzeneaux, 26, serving 25 years for second-degree murder, and Sylvester Alexander, 33, serving 40 years for robbery. Freeman had escaped once before and had been foiled in other attempts. In June, 1970, he had taken a 9-mm pistol from a hollowed-out Bible and shot his pregnant wife and stepdaughter in their heads as they slept. They included Ronald Lee Freeman, 41, a former church deacon serving 198 years for double murder.
STEAK ESCAPE NASHVILLE TN PLUS
Their aggregate sentences totaled 263 years plus seven life terms. In the narrow world of bad men behind the bars and concertina wire at Fort Pillow, the five who fled were among the worst. Thirteen inmates who chose not to escape were herded into the ravine. Long and Hopper were stripped of their uniforms, hogtied with baling wire and tape, and dumped in a silage pit. When guard Ricky Long raised his shotgun, two other inmates drew pistols, which apparently had been stashed in the dirt by an accomplice. Suddenly, at 10:35 a.m., one of the prisoners pulled a pistol and stuck it in the neck of guard Norman Hopper. 18, they shambled through the west trap gate at Fort Pillow State Prison with their two guards to cut firewood in a nearby ravine, seven miles from the Mississippi River. They were known as the Muslim Line, a gang of 18 inmates who worked on Saturday so they could observe the Islamic sabbath on Friday.
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