7 escaped inmates still at large after 3-day manhunt in New Orleans, police say

Seven inmates remained on the loose Sunday night after escaping from a New Orleans jail Friday, probably with help from inside the facility, according to local authorities, who warned that the escapees should be considered “armed and dangerous.”

Deputies discovered the inmates had disappeared Friday at 8:30 a.m. during a routine headcount and immediately began “emergency protocols,” Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson told reporters Friday, adding that her deputies were working with local and state law enforcement to try to recapture them.

Col. Robert P. Hodges, the Louisiana State Police superintendent, said Sunday during a news conference that authorities have received “numerous tips” and are “confident at this time that we have actionable intelligence” on the inmates remaining at large that will allow officers to apprehend them “in the coming days if not the coming hours.”

But he said the effort would require the work of multiple agencies and the support of the public because the fugitives may have fled to “other parishes and other states.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) said the jailbreak could be the largest in the state’s history and “should never have happened."

”The public deserves to know who, what and how this happened," he said at Sunday’s news conference, adding that the attorney general’s office will be tasked with answering those questions.

Investigators have found evidence that the escapees got help from sheriff’s office employees, three of whom have been put on administrative leave, Jeworski Mallett, the sheriff’s chief of corrections, said Friday evening during a news conference. Jonathan Tapp, special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans office, said during Sunday’s news conference that the agency “strongly” believes that inmates are receiving help on the outside to evade capture.

The sheriff’s office originally reported that 11 inmates escaped but later discovered one of them was still in custody.

Louisiana State Police said troopers tracked down one inmate hiding under a car in a French Quarter hotel’s parking garage, and after a brief chase, arrested him. The French Quarter, a major tourist destination, is about three miles by foot from the jail. Another inmate was captured Friday evening, the sheriff’s office said.

Louisiana State Police said on social media that rewards totaling $20,000 were being offered for information leading to the capture of the others.

Photos of the purported escape route released by the sheriff’s office show a jail cell with a metal toilet pushed to the side, exposing a precut hole. Above it, the escapees allegedly wrote various messages such as “To easy lol” and “Catch us when you can.”

More than half the inmates who escaped are charged or have been convicted of either murder or attempted murder, according to sheriff’s office records. Others are accused of armed robbery, aggravated assault and committing numerous gun crimes.

Hutson said she was opening an investigation to determine what led to “a very serious and unacceptable situation,” an inquiry that will include jail protocols, staff performance and physical security measures.

“Any lapses or failures that contributed to this incident will be addressed swiftly and with full accountability,” she said.

Critics have trained their fire on the time it took the sheriff’s office to alert other law enforcement agencies of the escape.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said city police weren’t notified about the escape until 10:30 a.m., about two hours after the routine headcount turned up short. The department then set out to inform the public so people could protect themselves and help with the search.

“We wanted to immediately notify our public because we knew these escapees would be in our city,” she said before promising a “full court effort” to track down the escapees.

Kirkpatrick declined to criticize the sheriff’s office but said the delay in reporting the escape was “concerning.” When asked whether Hutson should have let her know about the escape sooner, the superintendent demurred.

“We’ll deal with that at another time,” she said.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams told WDSU he was angry that he learned of the jailbreak at 11:13 a.m. from news reporters, not his “law enforcement partners across the street.” Williams and two of his prosecutors tried the case against one of the escapees and secured a life sentence but for almost three hours after the sheriff’s office discovered the jailbreak, he didn’t know what had happened.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson leaves a news conference in New Orleans on Friday, May 16, 2025, after inmates escaped from the Orleans Justice Center jail.

Upon learning of the escape, Williams told the TV news station, he called the U.S. Marshals Service, Louisiana State Police and the governor to ask for help. He also made sure the two prosecutors were escorted to their homes to pick up their families and leave town for a few days.

Murrill, the attorney general, said she had marshaled state resources to help the police and sheriff’s deputies, but she also touched on the reported delay.

“Someone clearly dropped the ball and there’s no excuse for this,” Murrill wrote in a social media post. “My office will do whatever it takes to determine how this happened and make sure that it won’t happen again,” she said, adding that “once these offenders are back in custody, there must be real accountability.”

The Orleans Justice Center jail, left, in New Orleans is seen on Friday, May 16, 2025.

The sheriff’s office said that, after discovering the inmates had disappeared, deputies notified jail leadership by 8:35 a.m. Officials hailed Louisiana State Police, probation and parole officials and the U.S. Marshals Service at 9:30 a.m., the sheriff’s office added.

But the sheriff’s office acknowledged “lapses in security” contributed to the escape. Although deputies put the jail on lockdown at 10:30 p.m. the night before, inmates were able to exit their cells because of defective locks and doors, the sheriff’s office said.

At 12:23 a.m. the escapees started tampering with a locked cell door and ultimately broke it open, unobserved by a civilian employee who had left to get food, according to the sheriff’s office. The inmates then breached a wall behind a toilet in their housing unit. Normally, a crosshatch of metal bars combined with metal plumbing bolted into the concrete make it impossible to squeeze through the precut hole behind the toilet.

“All of these have been removed, and these have been clean cut,” Mallet said. “We have reason to believe that there was some assistance with this.”

At 1:01 a.m., the inmates exited the jail via a door at the docks, through which supplies are brought into the facility, scaled a jail wall using blankets to protect themselves from razor wire and ran across nine lanes of Interstate 10. Once across, they shed their jail uniforms, which investigators later found.

Hutson has been complaining about overcrowding and understaffing — and trying to raise money to address both since she took office in 2022, Nola.com reported last month.

Last year, Hutson requested the New Orleans City Council increase her budget by 60 percent, from $55.3 million to $88.3 million to deal with an influx of inmates, according to Nola.com. The sheriff told city leaders her office was holding far more people than the jail and her staff could handle, costing millions in unexpected expenses.

The roughly 1,500 inmates the jail has housed for the last year has been well above the 1,250-inmate limit the city council had put in place and far more than the 900 inmates her deputies can safely oversee, the news agency reported.

“We are underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, so we do our best to hire staff and retain them,” Hutson said Friday, “but like everyone else, we’re short.”

Annabelle Timsit contributed to this report.