Bed sheet helps inmate escape, strands other

Peering at the jail facility wall through the dark, a nurse watched a tall, thin man lower himself down a rope fashioned of bed sheets Monday evening. Atop the roof was another man, ready to follow.

Matthew Johnson, 29, was about half way down when the improvised rope snapped, sending him some 20 feet to the ground. With fractured ankles and vertebrae, he fled.

The nurse phoned the minimum security Community Corrections Center to tell staff of the breach around 9:10 p.m. Monday. A lockdown was ordered. Heads were counted. Inmate Johnson was discovered missing, as was 37-year-old Christopher Cornelius.

A search of the perimeter revealed a breach on the fourth floor pedway, said Metro Corrections Director Mark Bolton, who detailed Tuesday the first escape from one of his facilities in years.

"Certainly, anytime that you have inmates that have been able to breach the secure perimeter of a detention facility, we've got a problem," he said. "If we find that there have been some violation of policies or procedures or protocols, we're going to take action on that."

A review is underway of staff actions, the facility's internal and external perimeters and camera functionality.

The exterior pedway connects the two buildings of the facility and is frequented "quite often" by inmates, Bolton said. The two men are believed to have climbed nearly 15-feet to the ceiling of the pedway, removed razor wire and pulled themselves onto the roof.

Both men, being held at the facility on heroin possession charges, were considered minimum security inmates at the center, 316 E. Chestnut St. They were assigned cleaning detail and had easy access to bed linens, though it's not yet clear if they were aided in their escape or how their homemade rope was concealed, Bolton said.

"The Community Corrections Center was never designed as a secure institution," Bolton said, adding it was originally a work release center that was partly converted to house minimum security inmates as the population at the main jail boomed.

Warrants were issued for both men just before 11 p.m. MetroSafe and the Real Time Crime Center were contacted to gather leads. Metro Correction's Incident Response Team was activated by 11:30 p.m., Bolton said, about the time the jail was given information that perhaps both men didn't successfully escape.

Investigators redirected to the roof where they found Cornelius stranded behind two generators.

Working through the night, Corrections officers determined Johnson's location by 5 a.m. Tuesday and found a vehicle they thought he was in by 6 a.m. Louisville Metro Police and Jeffersontown Police found him in the back seat of a car during a traffic stop, Bolton said. The car's driver, Sarah Johnson, faces a misdemeanor charge of hindering prosecution or apprehension.

As the investigation continues, Bolton said other inmates might face charges. He lauded the collaboration between agencies at the Tuesday news conference.

"I want to accentuate the fact that we were on this, we were on this quickly and within nine hours both individuals were back in custody," he said.

Both now face felony second-degree escape charges, punishable by one to five years in prison. Cornelius is back in Metro Corrections custody, while Johnson is recovering from his injuries at the hospital.

Reporter Matthew Glowicki can be reached at (502) 582-4989. Email him at mglowicki@courier-journal.com.