Guards' lapses led to Arkansas prison escape, state says; 1 fired at prison, 3 more punished

Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones

PINE BLUFF -- The state's prison director said Monday that "complacency" and too few guards watching inmates at a work unit contributed to the escape of a convict who had killed a teenage girl and stuffed her body in a barrel.

The Arkansas Department of Correction fired one employee, suspended another and reprimanded two because of the escape, said Solomon Graves, spokesman and legislative liaison for the agency. Their names were not released Monday.

"Complacency existed among all four of those staff," agency Director Wendy Kelley said in an interview Monday evening. "Unfortunately, it shouldn't take this to be a wake-up call on being complacent on the work site, but I think that is what this did."

Lloyd Jones, 40, had lived near Lavaca in Sebastian County. He pleaded guilty in August 2012 to first-degree murder in the death of Angela Allen of Van Buren. Jones also was convicted of abuse of a corpse and possession of material depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child. Police said he killed the girl, stuffed her body into a barrel and buried her.

He was sentenced to 60 years.

On June 13, while assigned to a construction and demolition crew near the East Arkansas Regional Unit at Brickeys, he escaped. He was neither handcuffed nor shackled while on the work detail. Graves has said that Jones had an inmate classification that allowed him to work unshackled outside the prison as long as he was under armed guard.

He was on the run for three days before authorities captured him and moved him to a maximum-security unit in Tucker.

During a news conference Monday afternoon, Kelley said the escape occurred on the south end of prison property at a mobile home on Arkansas 131. Inmates were working to move the property's mobile home park so it would be closer to the unit. A total of 16 inmates, two security staff members and two construction supervisors were working at the time of Jones' escape.

However, not all eyes were on the prisoners while they were eating lunch, Kelley said. One security officer left the work site to take an inmate back to the unit for a medical appointment and to have lunch. A construction supervisor, who had left earlier to pick up supplies, met this officer and headed back to the unit.

Once he arrived at the site, he told the remaining construction supervisor and two inmates to go with him to install butane bottles and take a lunch break, leaving a correctional sergeant on site with 13 remaining inmates. About 11:45 a.m., the sergeant guarding the inmates working on the trailer was making a random count of inmates when he noticed one was missing.

Kelley said Monday evening, in an interview, that the three employees' supervisor was responsible for the work site and allowed the security officer to go to lunch.

From the initial escape point, Jones traveled 3.39 miles to where he was apprehended 75 hours later.

Kelley said during the news conference that an ankle bracelet would not have prevented Jones from escaping or being captured because Jones spent his time away from the staff in the woods and in a bayou. She said ankle bracelets only work when someone can be tracked indoors.

Jones encountered no one during his escape, the first on prison property since 2014, Graves said.

The escape situation has caused prison officials to look more closely at what went wrong.

"A committee has been set up to review post orders on construction projects," Kelley said. "Right now they are on the construction division. Generally speaking, where they are working at our facility -- and in this particular situation they are working on construction in east Arkansas -- they should have been reporting to a field officer in east Arkansas and he should have been involved.

"In this case that didn't happen. ... One of the officers went to lunch with the permission of a construction supervisor, and that just left one person there. It was not a good situation."

Information for this article was contributed by Brandon Riddle of Arkansas Online.

A Section on 06/28/2016

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