Escaped Prisoners Left Behind a Politely Racist Note for Police
Brendan O'Connor
Filed to: Have a nice day
Richard Matt
David Sweat
Clinton Correctional Facility
racists
The two murder convicts who escaped from upstate New York's Clinton Correctional Facility overnight on Friday left a a very polite and very racist note telling police and everyone, "Have a nice day!"
The escaped inmates—Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 34—had tricked guards using dummy bodies built out of sweatshirts while using mysteriously-acquired power tools to drill through walls and pipes, the New York Times reports. Anthony Annuci, the acting state corrections commissioner, told the Associated Press that the men's absence was discovered during an early morning bed check on Saturday.
"A search revealed that there was a hole cut out of the back of the cell through which these inmates escaped," Annucci said. "They went on to a catwalk which is about six stories high. We estimate they climbed down and had power tools and were able to get out to this facility through tunnels, cutting away at several spots."
On Sunday, Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America," the Times reports. He speculated that other prisoners might be covering for the escapees.
"I chatted with a couple of the inmates myself and said, 'You must be a very heavy sleeper,'" Cuomo said. "They were heard, they had to be heard."
At one point along their subterranean escape route, the prisoners left a racist note for anyone following them to find. (Animal New York has a good run-down of some of the euphemistic language media coverage of the escape has used to describe the note so far.)
.@NYGovCuomo looks at pipe used as part of escape. You can see aforementioned note in background. pic.twitter.com/QcJDXh0yHM
One more close up of the note left on pipe that 2 inmates used to escape Clinton Correctional in #Dannemora pic.twitter.com/GFYqFOOE8e
According to the Times, the note features "a caricature of a man wearing a conical hat appears above the words: 'Have a nice day!'" Hmm. Meanwhile, the AP describes the note as "a yellow square of paper with a smiling, bucktoothed face." Closer! But it's racist. It's a racist caricature of an Asian man.
Image via Andrew Cuomo's Flickr | h/t Animal New York. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.