DANNEMORA, N.Y. — A worker at an upstate New York maximum-security prison was arraigned Friday night on charges she helped two convicted killers escape last weekend.
Prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell, 51, was arraigned on the felony charge of promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor count of criminal facilitation.
Her lawyer, Keith Bruno, entered a not guilty plea on her behalf.
Mitchell is accused of befriending inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and giving them contraband.
She entered the courtroom with her hands cuffed in front of her, clad in jeans and a green top and looking terrified. She did not speak. She was ordered held in jail on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 bond on the felony count and is due back in court Monday morning.
District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier that the contraband didn’t include power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.
Wylie would not elaborate on the charges Friday as more than 800 law enforcement officers continued to search for the escapees, concentrating in a rural area around the prison in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Earlier, residents reported seeing two men jumping a stone wall outside Dannemora.
“We’re coming for you, and we will not stop until you are caught,” state police Maj. Charles Guess said in addressing the escapees as he headed a news conference after Mitchell’s arrest.
Guess said officers were getting closer with every step they take on the ground and in the investigation.
Though searchers were contending with bad weather, so were Sweat and Matt, the major said.
“They’ve got to be cold, wet, tired and hungry” if they haven’t escaped the area or found shelter, Guess said.
Mitchell’s family has said she wouldn’t have helped the convicts break out.
An instructor in the tailor shop where the men worked, Mitchell is also suspected of agreeing to be a getaway driver but didn’t show up, leaving the men on foot early Saturday morning.
Mitchell has a job with a yearly salary of $57,697, overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison. Amid the criminal case, she was suspended without pay.
Within the past year, officials looked into whether Mitchell had improper ties to the 34-year-old Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff’s deputy, Wylie said.
He gave no details on the nature of the suspected relationship.
The investigation didn’t turn up anything solid enough to warrant disciplinary charges against her, the district attorney said.
