A former police chief, who had been sentenced to a lengthy prison term on charges of murder and rape in the United States, escaped from prison. He reportedly left the prison while wearing a fake police uniform.
According to the Associated Press on the 26th (local time), U.S. correctional authorities stated that Grant Hardin escaped from a prison in Calico Rock, Arkansas, on the afternoon of the 25th. He previously served as the police chief of the small town of Gateway, located on the border of Arkansas and Missouri.
Hardin, who had been incarcerated here since 2017, reportedly disguised himself in a makeshift police uniform to escape from prison. Security cameras around the prison captured him wearing a black police uniform and pulling a cart as he left the facility. Correctional authorities noticed that he was missing about 20 minutes later and are collaborating with state and federal police to track his whereabouts.
Hardin was revealed to be the perpetrator of the murder of a 59-year-old city official, found in a vehicle with gunshot wounds to the face in Gateway in February 2017, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for first-degree murder in October of that year. Additionally, a DNA match later identified him as responsible for a rape case involving an elementary school teacher that had remained unsolved since 1997, resulting in an added 25-year sentence in 2019.
Correctional authorities consider the escape of a violent criminal with a height of 180 cm and a weight of 117 kg, who has a background in law enforcement, to be a threat to the community, and are mobilizing law enforcement to search for and apprehend him. They are also investigating how Hardin obtained materials within the correctional facility to create the police uniform.