David Sweat shares detailed information about his prison escape

During numerous interviews conducted in the days after he was captured, David Sweat shared with investigators details about the tedious work and sheer luck that allowed him and fellow inmate Richard Matt to escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York on June 6.

Sources familiar with the interviews told The New York Times that Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for murder, first sawed a hole into the back of his cell, and once that was finished, started looking for an escape route through the tunnels under the prison. He was never afraid of being caught, he said, because the guards were asleep. By February, he had access to the catwalks behind the cells, and after head count at 11:30 p.m., would crawl through the hole, go down pipes, and roam the tunnels, returning by 5:30 a.m. head count. At one point, while he was trying to cut through a concrete wall, the heat from steam pipes became too hot, so he took a fan from his cell and brought it with him, using electricity from the tunnel's lights to power it.

The noise Sweat made did catch the attention of another prisoner, who asked Matt about some sounds he heard in his cell; Matt, a painter, said he was working on a frame or stretching canvas. Finally in May, a hot pipe began to cool after the prison's heat was turned off, and Sweat decided to use the pipe as a shortcut. He worked for four weeks, cutting holes into it large enough for the men to go through. They did a dry run, but when prison worker Joyce Mitchell wasn't there to pick them up when they finally escaped, there was no Plan B and they ran into the woods.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The pair eventually split up, Sweat said, and Matt was shot and killed June 26 when he refused to drop a shotgun after being cornered by police. Two days later, Sweat was found by the Canadian border, and also shot. Several of his interviews were conducted from his hospital bed, the sources said, and most of his information has been corroborated or found credible. Sweat is now being held at the maximum-security Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, New York, in solitary confinement.