A sharpshooting state police sergeant gunned down on-the-run convict
David Sweat after spotting him jogging down a country road Sunday,
ending a three-week search for him and a fellow prisoner after their stunning getaway from an upstate prison.
Sgt. Jay Cook, on patrol alone mere miles from the Canadian border,
spotted the convicted murderer at 3:20 p.m. on a roadway in the town of
Constable, state police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico said.
After ignoring Cook’s orders, Sweat, 35, made a run for it through a
field and almost reached a tree line, D’Amico said. That’s when Cook, a 21-year veteran of the force, opened fire with his handgun, hitting the unarmed Sweat in the torso twice.
The sure shot took Sweat down some 16 miles from where his fellow fugitive, Richard Matt, 49, was shot and killed by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. An autopsy revealed Matt was hit by three bullets to the head.
“The nightmare is finally over,” Gov. Cuomo said to cheers from relieved locals. “It has been a long, long time.”
Sweat was taken to Alice Hyde Medical Center in nearby Malone and
transferred to an Albany hospital for further treatment, D’Amico said.
The end to the manhunt came hours after authorities revealed they’d
found Sweat’s DNA on a “picnic-style” pepper shaker at a camp in the
woods.
D’Amico said Sweat and Matt had likely used the pepper to throw off dogs sniffing out their trail.
“It was fairly effective,” D’Amico said.
Mike Doyle, 41, who lives across the street from where Sweat was shot
told the Daily News he couldn’t believe his eyes when 60 law enforcement
vehicles swarmed the scene.
“Going through my mind was like ‘Holy s---!’ It was very overwhelming —
like, this is real! We’re four miles from the Canadian border, we
didn’t expect this around here,” Doyle told the Daily News.
An ambulance drove into the field to pick up the bloodied Sweat, who was wearing camouflage pants. Doyle was in awe.
The scores of law enforcement officers “were like flies on s--t,
running through the fields with guns drawn, throwing their jackets on
while running. It was wicked,” Doyle said. “There had to be like, oh, my
God, 200 officers. ... It was intense. Indeed, it was intense.”
Sweat’s mother said she was glad her son wasn’t killed.
“It was a sigh of relief, I started to cry,” Pamela Sweat told CNN
Sunday when she heard about her son’s capture. “He wasn’t killed.”
Constable is about 39 miles west of the Clinton Correctional Facility —
the prison in Dannemora from which the pair escaped June 6 using power
tools.
Their methods were made for Hollywood.
“If you were writing a movie plot, you would say this was overdone,” Cuomo said.
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