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Article Title: New Orleans jailbreak reveals chronic problems in the city’s criminal justice system
🔶Publish Date: May 24, 2025
🔶Author Name: Kevin Tibbles
🔶Section: News
🔶Keywords: New Orleans, jailbreak, prison escape, criminal justice system, court delays, overcrowding, understaffing
🔶Canonical URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-orleans-jailbreak-reveals-chronic-problems-citys-criminal-justice-rcna185888
🔶Featured Image URL: https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f_auto,q_auto:best/rockcms/2025-05/250523-orleans-parish-escapees-surveillance-camera–se-117pa-f23b65.jpg
🔶Featured Image Alt Text: Escaped inmates roamed the streets of New Orleans under the watch of surveillance cameras.
🔶Opening Summary: A recent jailbreak in New Orleans exposed deep-seated issues within the city’s criminal justice system, including court delays, overcrowding, and understaffing. The escape of 10 inmates and their subsequent recapture highlighted the frustrations of victims’ families and the systemic challenges plaguing the Orleans Justice Center.
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While the inquiry continues, it’s already clear that no one was able to stop the 10 inmates in Cell 6.
The men, ranging in age from 19 to 42, some wearing orange jail uniforms and others in long, white pants and T-shirts, each shimmied through the hole, some pausing to leave taunting messages on the wall. “To easy LOL,” one wrote.
They leapt off the loading dock and made it to a barbed-wire fence, which they scaled with blankets. Then they dashed across an interstate and slipped into the night.
It was about 1:30 a.m.Another seven hours passed before the regular morning head count revealed that the 10 men were missing from Pod 1-D.
By then, they were long gone.
Dawn Cooka truck driver, was at the wheel of her rig that Friday morning when she got a call from someone at the Orleans Parish district Attorney’s Office telling her Corey Boyd, the man accused of killing her son last year, had broken out of jail.
“He said there’d been an escape,” Cook, 71, recalled. “He didn’t have any details.”
Around the same time, she also got an automated text from a jail messaging system notifying her that Boyd, who was charged with murder, was no longer in custody.If she needed help, it said, call 911.
The news made her more mad than scared.
On April 29, 2024, her son, “Mister” Brandon Fees, was on a porch in the Marigny neighborhood with his girlfriend when they saw a group of people breaking into cars, according to police. Fees, 38, confronted them. They argued, and one of the suspects shot Fees. Boyd then struck Fees with a car, authorities said.
Boyd, 19, who pleaded not guilty, had been in jail for nearly a year before he escaped, and the case was nowhere near going to trial. the killing was caught on surveillance footage, but it took four months for Boyd to be indicted, and as then the case has been slowed by postponements and arguments over the sharing of evidence.
The holdups infuriated her. “I’ve been angry for a year now,” Cook said. “There’s a lot more to this than this escape. This is just too much.”
Delays in criminal cases are a chronic problem in New Orleans – and many other areas of the country – due in large part to backlogs created when the pandemic shut down courts. The difficulties in new Orleans go even deeper. The jail has been under federal scrutiny for overcrowding, understaffing, defective technology and malfunctioning doors; a court-appointed monitor cited the jail last year for failing to separate inmates who were violent or at risk of escape and for leaving housing units unsupervised for hours at a time.
Hutson responded that the jail had improved in some areas, including training, and said she had about half of the staff members she would need to run the jail optimally.
At last count, more than half the 1,400 or so inmates at the Orleans Justice Center were charged with a violent crime, more than 200 of them charged with a homicide.
At 10:30 a.m. on May 16, after authorities knew for sure who was missing and had talked to their alleged victims, officials released word of the jailbreak to the public.
By that point, federal, state and local law enforcement had launched an enormous manhunt, tapping into the city’s network of cameras equipped with facial recognition software.
the escapees had scattered. A surveillance camera spotted Kendell Myles, 20 – charged in a carjacking that left a man seriously wounded – walking in the French quarter just before 10 a.m. in a dark hoodie and jeans, according to local NBC affiliate WDSU.Police later found him hiding under a car in a hotel parking garage and arrested him after a short chase, officials said.
Robert Moody, 21, who is facing battery, weapons and drug charges, fled south, making it about 2 miles before authorities captured him with help from a Crimestoppers tip. Two more inmates were later caught farther afield, 8 to 10 miles northeast of the jail.
