By Cindy Von Quednow, Rebekah Riess, Jason Morris

(CNN) — A fifth inmate was recaptured following a breakout at a New Orleans jail last week, authorities announced, the same day a maintenance worker at the facility was arrested after allegedly helping with the escape.

Corey Boyd, 19, was arrested Tuesday, days after he and nine other men escaped the Orleans Justice Center Friday. The breakout has left New Orleans on high alert — with members of the district attorney’s staff fleeing for their safety — and local and state officials investigating how an escape could have happened. All five inmates were arrested in New Orleans.

Earlier Tuesday, Sterling Williams, a maintenance worker with the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, was arrested for “willfully and maliciously” assisting with the escape, according to a search warrant affidavit.

He was charged with one count of malfeasance in office and 10 counts of principal to simple escape. His bond was set at $1.1 million, $100,000 for each charge he is facing, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a social media post.

Williams was appointed a public defender, Michael Kennedy, who said he has not met with his client but is expected to do so Wednesday morning.

Murrill told Fox News Tuesday that authorities believe Williams was involved over a period of time.

“We think that it was more than just that night,” she said. “I can’t really give all the details of times and dates, but we believe this person had multiple days of involvement.”

An agent with the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation described Williams as being initially “evasive and untruthful” before providing information, according to the affidavit.

Williams said inmate Antoine Massey threatened to shank him if he didn’t turn off the water to the cell used in the breakout, according to the affidavit.

If the water had still been on, “the plan to escape would not have been successful and potentially flooded the cell, drawing attention to their actions,” according to the affidavit.

A previous escape

Massey had previously escaped from a detention center in North Louisiana in August 2019, authorities said.

“It didn’t surprise me, because (Massey) was known for that,” Morehouse Parish Sheriff’s Office Chief James Mardis told CNN about learning that Massey had escaped once again.

In 2019, Massey and another inmate broke out of the Morehouse Parish Detention Center in Collinston, before being recaptured in Lancaster, Texas, Mardis told CNN Tuesday.

They cut through the wire of a chain link fence at the exercise yard of the facility and crawled under it in broad daylight back in August 2019, Mardis said. A vehicle with Texas tags was seen in the rural area and was believed to have picked up the men. Deputies and corrections officers were at the scene within minutes, but the men had gotten away, he said.

The men were taken into custody that evening in Texas, the sheriff’s office said at the time.

Mardis said he was told of Massey’s second escape on Monday, though the Louisiana State Police had called to ask about the inmate over the weekend, he said.

Massey and nine other men broke out of the Orleans Justice Center through a hole behind a metal toilet just after midnight Friday. The escapees face an array of charges including aggravated assault with a firearm, false imprisonment with a weapon and murder.

“This was a coordinated effort, aided by individuals inside our own agency, who made the choice to break the law,” Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said Tuesday at a meeting of the city council’s criminal justice committee. Hutson noted the agency continues “to pursue everyone involved.”

Audit follows escape

The sheriff’s office provided city council members with notes following the successful escape, acknowledging “staff failed to conduct proper security checks, security checks were skipped or incomplete,” and they “failed to detect early warning signs.”

Hutson added after the meeting that the jail was still operating with “outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in supervision and critical staffing shortages.”

“These vulnerabilities have been raised repeatedly in our funding requests and now, the consequences are undeniable,” she said in a statement.

Additionally, at least 10 seasoned auditors from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections are being sent to the Orleans Justice Center this week to investigate the escape.

The audit will “concentrate on jail operations, such as overall jail security, jail staffing and jail policy and procedures,” Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Gary Westcott said in a news release Tuesday.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry tasked the department to audit the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, to ensure they were in compliance with “conditions necessary to ensure the safe, efficient, effective and legal operation of a jail facility,” the release added.

The last audit of the facility by the Department was in 2014, according to the agency.

“Public trust and safety is paramount and when events such as the recent jailbreak occur it erodes that confidence,” Westcott said. “The Department’s dedicated correctional professionals are committed to providing insight that will help local jails mitigate any future occurrences within correctional settings.”

How the escape unfolded

The Orleans Justice Center went into lockdown at 10:30 p.m. Thursday, meaning inmates were expected to stay in their cells.

Shortly after midnight Friday morning, a corrections monitoring technician stepped away for food. During that time, several inmates started yanking on the door of Cell Delta 1006.

A staff member should have been monitoring the cameras in the facility, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said at a Monday news conference.

Eventually, the door broke open and the men snuck into another cell. Within minutes, 10 inmates maneuvered past a metal toilet, squeezed through a small hole carved in the wall and ran.

The men brought blankets to protect themselves from barbed wire. They scaled a fence, ran across Interstate 10, darted into a nearby neighborhood, ripped off their inmate clothes and disappeared into the night.

Before they broke out, they taunted jail staff with a message scrawled above their escape hole:

“To Easy LoL,” it read.

The hole itself is one sign of the continued lapses at the facility, according to the district attorney. “Someone should have caught the destruction of the toilet and destruction of the wall and getting out, because that doesn’t happen in a day, does it?” he said. “So, it was missed during the entire time that that plan was being hatched.”

“This is not just about one lunch break,” he added.

The escape wasn’t discovered until a routine head count at 8:30 a.m., Hutson said Friday.

Boyd, Dkenan Dennis, Robert Moody, Kendell Myles and Gary Price are in custody following Friday morning’s jail break, and are being held at Louisiana State Penitentiary, a maximum security facility.

Massey, along with Jermaine Donald, Derrick Groves, Leo Tate and Lenton Vanburen remain at large.

CNN’s Caroll Alvarado, Holly Yan, Zoe Sottile and Rafael Romo contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.