Two Arizona inmates who escaped from jail about five days ago were caught in a cotton field in a nearby city on Thursday morning.
According to authorities, John Charpiot, 49, was convicted of child abuse and sexual abuse and sentenced to 35 years, and David Harmon, 61, charged with kidnapping and second-degree burglary.
The yacht was involved in house-to-door searches in about 800 homes, but it was a call to police from a man driving a truck who thought he had spotted it that led to the arrests, said the police chief of Coolidge. There were other calls as well.
“If you look at the record of both of these topics – one of them is a rapist at home, while the other is a molester of children ranging from 7 to 4 years old,” the Arizona Department of Public Safety said, col. Heston, said. Said Silbert.
“These were bad people who wanted to take us off the street,” he said.
Charpiot and Harmon escape from the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, about 14 miles from Coolidge. They were last seen on Saturday, authorities said. The same day, they tried to rob a business in Florence, the Department of Public Safety said.
When confronted in the field, no escaped prisoner obeyed the orders, or tried to walk away from the police before their arrest, and ran away, said Arizona District Attorney David Gonzales.
Five deputy officers happened to be in Coolidge on an unrelated fleeing warrant and were at the police department when the call of observation came in, he said.
“At one point, they both said, ‘Just shoot me,'” Gonzales said.
Officers and officers used Taser anesthesia devices to subdue the inmates, he said.
Charpiot and Harmon were able to overthrow 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 Re-entry.
An investigation into how they escaped is underway, he said. Police are also withdrawing to track down the movements of the two inmates, Silbert said.
