Dickinson DPS Helps Capture Escaped Prisoners

DPS

Officer Jill McGeehan of DPS . Photo by Carl Socolow '77.

DPS officer engages in foot chase that leads to the capture of fugitives

In case you missed it, two Franklin County Jail inmates walked away from a work-release job interview in Carlisle on Tuesday and fled. State Police were notified, and a hunt for the fugitives was soon underway, with the help of the Carlisle Police Department and Dickinson’s Department of Public Safety (DPS).

Officer Jill McGeehan of DPS received early notice of the inmates’ escape and began looking around the buildings in the vicinity of Dickinson Park. She came upon the two men leaving a restroom near the athletic fields, at which point she questioned them. When the men had no identification and gave McGeehan fake names, she called for backup, and the men ran. McGeehan chased them across Ritner Highway, past Gold’s Gym, at which point the men ran up and over the railroad tracks, disappearing. McGeehan called it in and returned to the bathrooms at Dickinson Park, to secure the area for scent-tracking purposes.

That turned out to be a savvy move, as after local and state law enforcement, with DPS officers, set up a perimeter, Carlisle Police’s K9, Pedro, followed the fugitives’ scent to a storage facility on nearby Newville Road, where they were hiding. The men, both serving sentences for retail theft charges, were apprehended without incident.

“Dickinson Public Safety is fortunate to have close and cooperative working relationships with area law enforcement agencies,” says Dolores “Dee” Danser, chief of public safety at Dickinson, “but our relationship with Carlisle Police is especially important, [and it] aids in our ability to work together in situations like these.”

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Published March 24, 2017