David Sweat Details How He Escaped From Prison

Every night, Sweat would investigate the tunnels beneath the prison in search of a way out.

Sweat is the second of two convicted murderers who staged a brazen escape three weeks in the past from a maximum-security jail in northern New York.

David Sweat, the former Clinton Correctional Facility inmate who was captured on June 28 after a gripping 22 days on the run, revealed to investigators he and fellow escapee Richard Matt couldn’t help but compare their efforts to that of the fictional story in 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.

– Sweat began working in January, when he was transferred to the cell next to Matt, using a hacksaw blade to cut a hole in the back of his cell.

By February Sweat had access to the catwalks behind the cells and he would spend each night crawling through the pipes and roaming the tunnels from 11:30 p.m. till 5:30 a.m. Around May 4, when the prison shut down its heating system for the season, one of the pipes, a blistering 24-inch steam main, started to cool.

Sweat said he used hacksaw blades with handles made from rags to cut holes into the pipe that were big enough for him and Matt to crawl through, the New York Times reported. Joyce Mitchell was supposed to pick the two of them up in a car, but never showed up.

After their escape – which they had given far less thought to – they eventually split and Matt was found and killed on June 26 when he refused to drop a firearm. Sweat was shot and brought into custody a few days later.

An investigation into Clinton County Correctional Facility is ongoing. Sweat’s account, along with interviews of corrections officers and prison officials, documents and reviews of other evidence, will no doubt play a significant role in determining what went wrong at the prison and within the culture of the agency. The head of the prison has retired after being suspended.

He delivered his accounts from his hospital bed, and he is now being held in solitary confinement at a prison in Romulus, New York.

The movie comparison wasn’t lost on Sweat or Matt. as said by Sweat, he and Matt joked often about the similarities between their prison break and that of Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption“.