Ten years ago this month, two dangerous convicts made a daring escape from the state prison in Dannemora. The sprawling, three-week manhunt that followed captivated Northern New York and the country, and sowed a tense fear around the North Country.
The escape from Clinton Correctional Facility
On Friday night, June 5, 2015, Leslie Lewis spent the night out with a friend. Just after midnight, he walked home to his place on Bouck Street in Dannemora.
"That's when I encountered them," said Lewis. "They were crossing the road from an abandoned-style house that's across the street to our house."
Lewis watched two men enter his backyard. He found that odd, so he said he went to confront them.
"One of them had already got out of the yard," said Lewis. "The other one was, like, just standing around the backside of a little pop-up camper. Basically, I'm like, ‘What the hell are you doing here? Why are you here?’ He's like, ‘Sorry, sorry, wrong direction’ and took off."
Lewis said it was a weird encounter, but he didn’t make much of it.
But by the next morning, the news was out. Two convicted murderers, Richard Matt and David Sweat, had escaped by tunneling out of the prison, into the town sewer system, and out a manhole onto Bout Street, where Lewis lived.
"These guys were just wearing normal civilian clothes, so I never thought anything about it," said Lewis. "I didn't know anything was going on until the next morning when I got woken up by the cops."
The police were going house to house, asking if residents had seen anything the night before.
Lewis recounted his experience, including a crucial detail, that one of the men had been carrying a soft guitar case. That helped prison officials confirm it was the escapees, as Sweat had kept a guitar in his cell, and they believed he might be carrying tools and clothes inside its case.
But by then, the men were gone.
Roadblocks and security checkpoints clog North Country roads
Within hours, Dannemora and surrounding communities were swarmed with police and corrections officers, and roads were clogged with roadblocks and security checkpoints.
Emma Wood was four years old in June 2015, now she’s 14. Her family lives in Peru, but they attend the Dannemora Methodist Church. She remembers going through checkpoints to work on her family’s garden plot at the church.
"We would have to stop, and they would have to search everything, and search the vehicle. Being four and from a small town, it was definitely different. I had never seen so many people in uniform," she remembered.
And according to Wood's mother, that experience left a big impression on the little girl.
"I really played with Barbies a lot," said Wood. "And she [Wood's mother] said that she would catch me after that playing ‘checkpoint’ with my Barbies. They would be in their car, they'd be stopped by a Barbie. They'd get searched, and then they could keep going. Apparently I called it prison escape," laughed Wood.
The search is on across northern NY
Nearly a thousand law enforcement officers, and agencies including the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, and Customs and Border Protection, fanned out far beyond Dannemora, to the Adirondacks, the Champlain Valley, and the Vermont and Canadian borders.
Claire Brownell was a junior at Potsdam High School at the time. The weekend Matt and Sweat escaped, she was attending a Rotary Youth Leadership Conference at Paul Smiths College.
She remembers being told about the escape by school officials in what she called a 'nonchalant' way. "Sort of just letting us know when we went back to our dorm rooms to make sure the windows were locked. And maybe to check our closets and maybe check under our beds," she said.
Brownell says everyone was calm, so she didn’t think much of it. "I knew about Dannemora, but not really. I just thought, OK, it's like a regular prison. They just got out." She said she didn't realize that "this was a really big deal" until her mom picked her up from the conference.
Paul Smiths College was used to house police officers and other personnel during the manhunt. So was Titus Mountain, the ski resort outside Malone.
The search drags on and on, with no sign of Matt and Sweat
The days and weeks dragged on. Law enforcement followed leads in Willsboro and Friendship, in western New York. But there was little sign of the escapees.
Area schools tightened security and stopped recess. Some visitors canceled their vacation plans in the area. Summer camps fielded calls from worried parents.
"People were on high alert, and we were just being like should we run, should we cancel?" remembered Casey Sukeforth, who was the summer camp director of 4H Camp Overlook in Mountain View in 2015.
Camp was supposed to start on July 1, but she says they had no idea if that would be possible. "It was just not what you're expecting when you're running a summer camp! I mean they always say, 'expect the unexpected.' You don't expect escaped convicts in your backyard, while you're trying to plan, you know, arts and crafts activities and canoeing!"
The search moves to Franklin County
Over about two weeks, Matt and Sweat had walked nearly 40 miles, from Dannemora towards Malone.
On June 22, 2015, the men’s DNA was found in a cabin near Owl’s Head in Franklin County. That was really close to Camp Overlook, and that's when Sukeforth says the state police took over camp.
"Four or five days they stayed there with the police dogs, because they couldn't stay in the local hotels," said Sukeforth. She said that was comforting, because "as a courtesy to us, they swept camp every night, you know, and all the buildings."
Marvin Raville also started seeing a lot of the State Police near the end of June.
He lives on Route 30 in Duane, just south of Malone, and the manhunt for Matt Sweat heated up in his front yard, quite literally. He said Route 30 was "solid with state trooper cars all up and down right here. They knew that he was right in this area," said Raville.
Raville says he let the State Police use his bathroom and post up on his deck. "The last two nights I had state troopers staged right here on the deck, and they had spotlights out by then," he said.
On June 26, Richard Matt was shot and killed in the woods not far from Raville’s home.
Raville remembers helicopters landing in his yard. He says that scene is burned into his memory, and it’s stayed with law enforcement, too. He said each June, State Troopers stop by in the field across from his home. "Just about every year they'll stop, take pictures, and give me a thumbs up."
Two days later, David Sweat was shot and taken into custody, also near Malone.
And just as quickly as life went sideways in Northern New York, it mostly went back to normal. The State Police went back to their regular posts.
Camp Overlook opened on July 1. But camp director Casey Sukeforth said no one forgot what had happened.
"That’s how I can tell if people were here in the North Country [at that time], because when you say it [the Dannemora escape], they instantly know," she said.
"And they say ‘this is what I was doing, and this is what I couldn’t do.’ It was almost like a mini-COVID, or a mini-lockdown where it shifted the course, just a little bit, of what we do and what we remember."
The escape, and the search that followed, are now a matter of collective memory.