Determined guy. Looks like he's stolen a truck and may have gotten through the police perimeter.

From folks in the area....are you hearing anything about what's going on?

It's all over the news. He ditched the truck because he ran out of gas. At some point last night he broke into someone's house and stole a rifle (thanks for securing your gun, random homeowner -- thank goodness you had a gun in your house to keep you safe from breakins....oh wait.... ) so now he is armed. And apparently shirtless - he ditched his hoodie and is now wearing only pants. The cops have one of the main roads in the area shut down and are stopping and searching every single car -- I guess they think he may have carjacked someone with his newfound weapon.

The original place where he broke out was a good hour away from me but the place they are searching now is only 20 minutes away....it's close to where my costco is and I kinda need to go there today so hopefully they either catch him or determine that he has snuck past them again and moved somewhere else.

We have started locking our doors all the time when we are home and locking our cars in the driveway which we don't normally do. Otherwise, we've just been following along with the news like everyone else. He does seem very determined -- did you see the video of how he actually broke out of the jail??? (He basically parkoured himself up through a small gap between 2 brick walls like some kind of ninja!) There have been at least 2-3 sightings of him a day on random security cameras and I'm actually pretty impressed at the amazing job he's doing of eluding everyone - they've got everyone from the State Police to the FBI to the US Marshalls here chasing him and he's making them all look like fools. Every day there's a press conference where they are like "we are positive he is in this 2 mile radius and we have him completely surrounded, there's no way he'll escape" and then the next day there's a press conference that says "He's been spotted on camera in a town 15 miles away. But now we promise we really do have him completely surrounded and there's no way he'll escape." Rinse and repeat. Seriously, it's like watching the keystone cops.

If he weren't an actual two-time murderer, I think I'd be rooting for him to get away....he doesn't seem hell bent on violence right now and until he stole the gun yesterday, he's only broken into empty houses to take food and clothing. I guess we'll see what happens now that he's armed.

Lisa, wow!

I haven't really followed the news at all (so for example, I didn't know what his crime was) but now I want to see the escape video!

Ask and ye shall receive

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3B6yP2x9Pfc

That's crazy!!!

So that homeowner had a loaded rifle just sitting around in his garage. I wonder if the boxes of ammo were conveniently nearby, too.

They finally caught him.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pen...-long-123416228.html

Apparently they were - they said he had both gun and ammo.

Even better - the garage was unlocked. And the homeowner saw the guy go into the garage, followed him in there, drew his own pistol and shot at him 6 times as he was making away with the rifle (that had apparently been "leaning in the corner of the garage" according to the article I read.) He missed. The irony of this guy spending his whole freaking life walking around with a pistol in his belt in his own house, waiting for his chance to be a "good guy with a gun," and then missing 6 times from just a few feet away is cracking me up. (The article also said the homeowner was not in trouble because he had "stored the firearm properly and did not leave it accessible" -- I guess the corner of an unlocked garage that any neighborhood kid could wander into is considered proper storage according to the PA State Police.)

But the good news is that they did catch him this morning...apparently unarmed and wearing an Eagles sweatshirt (so he had clearly swiped clothing from somewhere else). Details are still sketchy -- there's a press conference scheduled for 9:30 ET. There were really bad storms overnight and I'm guessing between the weather and lack of food, he just decided to give up.

Apparently another prisoner had used the same escape route from prison in May.

“To make a break for it, the 5-foot-tall prisoner crab-walked between two walls in the prison exercise yard, following a route that another prisoner had used in May. He then pushed through razor wires — which had been installed after the previous breakout attempt — and fled across the roof, over a fence and through more razor wire to freedom. A week into the manhunt, the prison fired a corrections officer who had been stationed in a watchtower but failed to see Mr. Cavalcante break out.” (NYTimes)

Just adding to the whole keystone cops experience, it has now come out that some homeowner accidentally triggered his own burglar alarm when he set it while he was home, forgot about it, and then tried to sneak out onto his porch to smoke a cigarette at midnight. The cops swarmed his house mounting a huge ground and air response while he tried to explain that he was the one who set his own alarm off. Meanwhile the airplanes circling the house detected a heat signal from a nearby field but were forced to go back to the airport when the storms hit. After the storms, they came back and found the heat signal again, surrounded him, and caught him by siccing a police dog on him. He had been surviving on stolen watermelons from a farm and planned to use the rifle to carjack someone to take him to Canada. So basically if it weren't for some idiot jonesing for his nicotine fix at midnight, this guy would likely still be running around free. (Though I wonder if cigarette guy will be the one collecting the $25K reward??!!)

Oh....and then there's this...apparently someone was either stir crazy from being trapped in rural PA for 2 weeks covering this mess or they have a really good sense of humor: https://www.mensjournal.com/ne...rd-reporter-question

There may be some truth to this:

“Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”

— James Carville

Lisa, how close are you to where he was finally captured?

About a half hour - so not really that close thank goodness. The initial news reports of where they were blocking the road and searching cars turned out to be off by about 6 miles, so he wasn't all that close to my costco either (I still didn't go, so now I might have to go on the weekend. Ugh!)

They did interview him and he said there were a few times when the cops were within 10 yards of him hiding in the brush and didn't find him. Not sure how they didn't have search dogs to find him at that point but I dunno.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
There may be some truth to this:

“Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”

— James Carville

That statement is frighteningly accurate actually.