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Escaping from police custody even once is impressive, doing it twice is a damn miracle. But six times? That’s just unheard of. Well Philip Andrew Marshall has done just that. And the funny thing is that the first time Marshall was ever arrested for was for…wait for it…evading arrest.
In what the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office calls “very frustrating,” Marshall has once again escaped custody, just one month after his last escape from a correctional facility in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Marshall was able to sneak away last month when he was left unshackled during a shower, despite the fact that he’s always supposed to be shackled outside his cell, the sheriff’s office said. He then made a break for it through a door a jail employee failed to completely shut, WSMV reports.
“It’s very frustrating, and it’s frustrating sometimes that employees don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” Sheriff Austin Swing told the TV station after Marshall’s fifth escape last month.Part of the problem is that the jail is so packed, authorities said: Though the jail’s capacity is between 100 and 105 inmates, the Times-Gazette reports that as recently as October it’s housed nearly 200 people. Compounding that overcrowding problem is a workforce shortage. Swing told WSMV that at times inmates outnumber jail guards 50 to 1.
“Right now, we are still terribly short-handed,” Bedford County Jail administrator Tim Lokey told the newspaper. “We’re just treading water.”
You probably don’t want to just “tread water” when you’re dealing with convicts, especially when some of them are capable of making your life a living hell. But I guess it works in Marshall’s favor, clearly, as he’s pulled this stunt off six times.
Marshall, who has been in jail on non-violent charges, has used everything from sneaking into the jail’s attic and then using bed sheets to escape, to escaping from a county’s workhouse and more. And all these have been successful.
At the moment Marshall hasn’t been caught. But with so many people that this country enjoys locking up, you’d think that they would have figured out how to keep folks from escaping constantly. Guess not.
