Three inmates escaped a Missouri jail late last night.
According to ABC , Rodney Joe Green, Matthew Brandon Cook, and Kade Reaves Stringfellow all escaped the Butler County Justice Center at about 11:30 pm last night. Cook was facing first degree murder charges, Stringfellow was being charged with second degree murder, and Green was in jail for multiple charges relating to a home invasion. All three men were awaiting trial.
The three were being held in the same area and worked as a team to escape, according to the sheriff’s department.
KCTV5 reports that the three inmates worked together to escape through the ceiling tiles of the Missouri jail. The three men reportedly climbed through the duct work in order to break out of the prison.
Butler County Sheriff Mark Dobbs blamed the design of the building was severely flawed.
Dobbs said: “Myself and the previous two sheriffs have fought the design and construction flaws in this jail. It’s frustrating beyond words …. We have drywall ceilings in a jail. That’s just unfathomable. The walls don’t go completely up to the ceiling. It just baffles the mind when the jail was being built why there would be these shortcomings.”
Several police agencies are now searching for the men from Poplar Bluff, Missouri to Little Rock, Arkansas.
Frank Casteel, 911 director for Butler County, said that the men are not considered a threat to the families of their previous victims but that they should be considered dangerous.
Casteel said: “With the severity of their crimes they were being held for, we do believe it’s possible they may have the capability to get their hands on weapons.”
Here are the mugshots for the three escaped inmates and a look at how they escaped.
The Butler County Sherrif’s Office is asking anyone with information to call officers at 573-785-8444.
This isn’t the only prison escape to hit the news recently. Two men escaped a high rise prison in downtown Chicago at the end of last year, prison guards successfully stopped a helicopter prison break in France , and, for some reason, a man broke back into jail by posing as a guard.