5 could lose jobs in NJ jail escape

Guards did not search the cells of two inmates for more than two months before they escaped by chipping holes in cinder-block walls, prosecutors said Monday in a scathing report that could lead to the firings of some officers.

Two corrections officers and three sergeants will face administrative charges stemming from the escape, Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow announced Monday.

All five face possible termination. Romankow said the report did not make recommendations on punishment, but Gary Hilton, the jail's acting director, was more forthcoming.

"Termination would be an appropriate sanction," said Hilton, who has been running the jail since shortly after the Dec. 14 escape.

All five jail employees were suspended without pay Friday, and they face a hearing next week to determine whether that status will continue.

Romankow blamed the escape of Otis Blunt and Jose Espinosa on a culture at the jail he described as "miserable" and "dysfunctional at best."

The report by the prosecutor's office found flaws in jail procedures, such as guards routinely ignoring rules governing head counts and searches of inmates' cells.

Jail regulations require that guards perform head counts on prisoners five times a day, starting at 5 a.m., but none were performed in Blunt and Espinosa's unit the day they escaped, Romankow said.

The investigation also revealed that no random searches had been conducted in the two men's cells since early October. According to Romankow, jail policy stipulates these searches must be done on a "routine and continuing basis."

"If the corrections officers on that unit had done their job, there would have been no escape," Romankow said.

James M. Mets, an attorney for corrections officer David D'Amore, said that the jail suffered from a culture of "learn as you go along," and that some officers never received the most recent regulations from superiors.

Another corrections officer, Rudolph Zurick, committed suicide two weeks after the Dec. 14 escape. He was named in a taunting note in which Blunt thanked him for his "help."

Romankow said that although Zurick would have been recommended for administrative charges had he lived, investigators found no evidence that he or any other employees intentionally helped the inmates.

Romankow also released the full text of a second note left by Blunt in his cell, a crude poem that taunts the guards he left behind and includes a racial slur.

"Both officers were either too lazy or crazy to ignore all the bangin'," Blunt wrote. "All the metal scrapin' cement only meant that (deleted) were escapin'."

The men escaped by digging holes through cinder-block cell walls. They had covered the hole out of the building with a pinup photo, a ploy depicted in the movie "The Shawshank Redemption."

Guards didn't raise an alarm until 5 p.m. on Dec. 15, 20 hours after the escape; the inmates had piled sheets under their blankets to make it appear they were sleeping.

Through interviews with Blunt and Espinosa, investigators learned that Espinosa used a heavy metal wheel to smash the wall at the same time Blunt was mopping the floor outside the cell to try to mask the sound.

They also revealed that after the pair exited onto a third-floor rooftop, Blunt waited nearly eight hours to make his escape after Espinosa leapt over a 25-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. Espinosa sprained his ankle in the fall and was hiding out in an apartment less than a mile away when he was captured Jan. 8.

Blunt eventually shimmied down a corner of the building, scaled a shed and climbed over the fence and through the razor wire, suffering cuts. He took a taxi and was dropped off at the Elizabeth train station with no money but somehow managed to get to Mexico City, where he was captured in a cheap hotel on Jan. 9.

"We think there were other people involved that were helping," Romankow said, but he offered no details.

Blunt, 32, was awaiting trial for robbery and weapons offenses at the time of the escape. Espinosa, 20, was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to manslaughter in a 2005 drive-by shooting.