New Orleans jail escapee was caught with help from an anonymous tip; 2 inmates still on the run
BATON ROUGE, La. — As police continue to scour Louisiana for the two remaining New Orleans jail escapees on the run, one fugitive was captured on Monday with the help of an anonymous tip from a concerned citizen.
Lenton Vanburen Jr., 26, was found Monday evening sitting on a bench near a department store in Baton Rouge — approximately 78 miles (125 kilometers) from the jail he and nine others escaped from earlier this month, police said.
Authorities also said Monday that five people were arrested for assisting Vanburen following the audacious jail escape through a hole behind a toilet. Three of those people share the same last name as Vanburen, including Lenton Vanburen Sr. All five were charged with accessory after the fact — a crime that involves harboring, concealing or aiding a felon who is avoiding arrest, trial, conviction or punishment — which is punishable by up to five years in prison.
On Monday, two other escapees were arrested in Walker County, Texas. Details about their capture were not available.
Still on the lam are Derrick Groves and Antoine Massey.
Groves, 27, was convicted on two charges of second-degree murder and two charges of attempted second-degree murder last year for his role in the 2018 Mardi Gras Day shootings of two men. He also faces a charge of battery against a correctional facility employee, court records show.
Massey, 33, has a lengthy criminal history. In March, he was booked on charges of motor vehicle theft and domestic abuse battery involving strangulation. He is also wanted by St. Tammany Parish authorities on suspicion of kidnapping and rape, law enforcement officials told The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.
Authorities have urged the public to call police with any information that may lead to the capture of Groves and Massey, and are offering $20,000 in rewards for tips leading to their arrest.
The bold New Orleans jailbreak occurred nearly two weeks ago, when the inmates yanked open a faulty cell door inside a jail, squeezed through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed-wire fence and fled into the cover of darkness.
Authorities didn't learn of the escape until a morning headcount, hours after the 10 men bolted for freedom. Graffiti was left on the wall at the scene of the crime, a message that read “To Easy LoL,” with an arrow pointing to the gap where the toilet once was.
City and state officials have pointed to multiple security lapses in the jail.
Conditions had been deteriorating in the jail in the months before the escape, with unsupervised inmates smoking marijuana “without fear of consequences” and fashioning weapons out of brooms, mops and buckets, according to a new report released Tuesday by an independent watchdog monitoring a 2013 federal consent decree that was intended to reform the jail.
The monitor urged Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to reestablish a high-security unit in the jail, noting the unrelenting violence among inmates that’s made the facility “not reasonably safe and secure.” Hutson, a progressive reformer, had abandoned the practice of housing certain inmates in a high-security setting after taking office in 2022.
“Many of the inmate-on-inmate assaults occur because staff allow inmates out of their cells and leave them unsupervised, or inmates are able to manipulate the locks on their cells to open them,” the monitors wrote in the report, which was written before this month’s escape.
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