On Saturday, convicted murderers David Sweat and Richard Matt escaped from the maximum security wing of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York near the Canadian border.
Escaping from a maximum security prison is not — we imagine anyway — a particularly easy task, but even as improbable jailbreaks go, this particular effort was quite remarkable.

In a scene straight out of "The Shawshank Redemption", Sweat and Matt apparently busted through a steel wall, maneuvered down catwalks, cut through a steel pipe, left a Post-it note with the message “Have A Nice Day”, and crawled their way to freedom, emerging from a manhole outside of prison walls. The New York Times has more [5]:
Duping guards with dummies fashioned out of sweatshirts and using power tools to drill out of their cells, the men made their getaway late Friday or early Saturday, emerging on the other side of the prison’s 30-foot-tall walls, officials said..
The governor marveled at the particulars of escape, in which the two inmates had cut through a steel wall of their adjacent cells, shinnied down a series of internal catwalks, and burrowed their way more than a city block away before emerging from a manhole. Mr. Cuomo said that there had been a number of contractors working in the facility, and that the escapees’ work may have been safeguarded by the silence of other prisoners.
“I chatted with a couple of the inmates myself and said, ‘You must be a very heavy sleeper,’ ” the governor said. “They were heard, they had to be heard”..
“When you look at how the operation was done, it was extraordinary,” Mr. Cuomo said on Saturday after being given a tour of the escape route. This was the first time in the prison’s history that anyone escaped from the maximum-security section of the facility, he said.
The State Police said that Mr. Matt, 48, and Mr. Sweat, 34, were discovered missing during a 5:30 a.m. bed check.
The inmates left a parting message, according to a picture posted to Twitter by Gareth Rhodes, the governor’s deputy press secretary. It shows a yellow Post-it note next to a hole cut in a pipe. On the note, a caricature of a man wearing a conical hat appears above the words: “Have a nice day!”
A massive manhunt is now underway involving hundreds of law enforcement officers, K-9s, bloodhounds, and helicopters.
Despite their apparent sense of humor, Sweat and Matt are considered extremely dangerous and although authorities would appreciate any help they can get, Governor Cuomo had the folowing warning for New York residents:
“These are dangerous people, and they are nothing to be trifled with.”





