Two Arizona inmates who escaped from prison about five days ago were caught in a cotton field in a nearby town on Thursday morning, officials said.
John Charpiot, 49, convicted of child molestation and sexual abuse and sentenced to 35 years, and David Harmon, 61, sentenced to 100 years for kidnapping and second-degree theft, were captured in Coolidge, according to authorities.
The manhunt involved door-to-door searches of some 800 homes, but it was a call to the police from a man who was driving a truck who thought he saw them that helped lead to the arrests, said Coolidge’s chief of police. There were other connections as well.
“When you look at the record of both subjects – one of them is a home invasion rapist, while the other is a child molester between the ages of 7 and 4,” said Arizona Director of Public Security, Colonel Heston Said Silbert.
“These were bad people that we wanted to get off the streets,” he said.
Charpiot and Harmon escaped from the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, 14 miles from Coolidge. They were last seen on Saturday, officials said. The same day, they tried to steal a business in Florence, the public security department said.
When they were confronted in the camp, none of the fugitive prisoners obeyed orders and, alternatively, tried to escape the police before they were arrested, said David Gonzales, a US delegate for the Arizona district.
Five deputies were by chance at Coolidge under an unrelated fugitive warrant and were in the police department when the sighting call came, he said.
“At one point, the two said, ‘Shoot me,'” said Gonzales.
Officers and marshals used Taser shock devices to subdue prisoners, he said.
Charpiot and Harmon managed to take down a wall-mounted air conditioning unit to gain access to a locked tool room, said Frank Strada, deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
An investigation into how they escaped is underway, he said. Police are also turning back to track the movements of the two inmates, said Silbert.
