UPDATE: 4 escaped Macon jail inmates were gone about 3 hours before officials knew
Four inmates who broke out of the Bibb County jail early Monday were gone for roughly three hours before authorities knew they escaped, according to Bibb sheriff David Davis.
Davis said Monday morning over the phone that deputies found the cut fence where the four men escaped at about 6:30 a.m., Monday, and backtracked from there to discover the missing inmates. The breakout happened at about 3:30 a.m., he said Monday afternoon.
The sheriff’s office did not tell the public about the jailbreak until a press release was issued at 11:20 a.m.
“Obviously this is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation. Patrol, investigators, our intel unit is in on this, the FBI,” Davis said. “One of these inmates had federal drug charges. Everyone is involved.”
Davis said the sheriff’s office also has video of the escape, which involved four inmates fleeing from the Oglethorpe Street jail in a blue Dodge Challenger, according to a press release.
The breakout stemmed from a combination of poor staffing, old facilities and crafty inmates, Davis said later at a press conference Monday afternoon. “Less than 10” people were staffed at the jail between 3 and 6 a.m., he said.
He added that the jailbreak happened in one of the oldest parts of the building when the four inmates pried a metal plate of a day room window to escape.
The men had some way of communicating with someone outside the jail, Davis said. Someone tampered with the fence the night before, then gave the inmates the tools to cut the hole in the fence.
One of the men, Joey Fournier, 52, was in the jail on murder charges.
The full relationship between the four men was unclear Monday, Davis said, though they were all in the same cell block at the jail.
Davis said at the press conference that the media notification was delayed because the sheriff’s office wanted to get the information right, explaining that the gap between the breakout being discovered at 6 a.m. and the public learning of it at 11:20 a.m. happened because they were verifying who escaped and how.
Fournier ran from police when he was first wanted for allegedly killing his former girlfriend at her home in Macon’s Barrington Hall neighborhood last year, Telegraph archives show. He fled to northwest Georgia before police apprehended him.
“We remember, I think, his brother had been involved in trying to harbor him, when we were looking for him one time before,” Davis said. “Really nothing is off the table right now. Right now you try to take in information from wherever you get it and follow those leads.”
The sheriff’s office issued photos and a BOLO for Fournier and the other three inmates Monday morning. The other escapees are Marc Kerry Anderson, 24, Johnifer Dernard Barnwell, 37 and Chavis Demaryo Stokes, 29.
