With Power Tools and a Ruse, 2 Killers Escape New York Prison

DANNEMORA, N.Y. — Two convicted murderers serving life sentences in adjoining cells staged an elaborate escape from New York’s largest state-run prison between Friday night and Saturday morning, fooling guards with makeshift dummies made out of sweatshirts and using power tools to drill out of their cells and past the prison’s 30-foot-tall walls, officials said.

The men remained at large late Saturday as law enforcement personnel conducted an extensive manhunt radiating outward from the Clinton Correctional Facility here, where residents hoped for a quick end to an unprecedented occurrence.

Police officers in bulletproof vests and armed with rifles manned roadblocks on routes leading to and from the town, peering into cars and checking trunks as red flares lit up the pavement on a chilly night.

Floodlights filled the street around the maximum-security facility, whose thick walls loomed high over the north side of the town’s main street, which was closed to most traffic. Dozens of law enforcement officials stood guard in a nearby neighborhood where the two escapees had emerged from a manhole.

The New York State Police said the inmates, Richard Matt and David Sweat, had escaped from the facility in Dannemora, an all-male maximum security prison about 170 miles north of Albany near the Canadian border. Within hours, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had canceled a scheduled visit to theBelmont Stakes horse race in Elmont, N.Y., to meet with the police and prison officials.

After he was briefed by the officials, who took him on a tour of the escape route, the governor took part in a news conference. Officials described a plan that involved the use of power tools to drill through steel walls and pipes.

“When you look at how the operation was done, it was extraordinary,” Mr. Cuomo said. 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. Both men were “a danger to the public,” and officials advised anyone who saw them not to approach and to contact the police.

Officials said the men, who lived in adjoining cells, drilled a hole through the steel wall at the back of their cells and walked onto a catwalk. They then climbed down and used the tools to drill through a maze of pipes and tunnels before exiting through a manhole on a nearby street, officials said.

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