The La Plata County Jail has implemented changes in recent years to address security concerns.
Since two inmates escaped in 2021, those efforts have undertaken a new urgency.
The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office plans to build a new fence surrounding the jail this year with funding from the county. Amid the pandemic, there is no timetable for when it will be completed, but the detentions division says newly instituted procedural changes and other upgrades will prevent another escape.
“We have had escapes from the jail. This last year was a bad year,” said Capt. Ed Aber, head of the sheriff’s detentions division and La Plata County Jail.
“Each time there's been an issue, we've addressed and fixed that issue so that it's not going to happen again,” Aber said.
In its 2022 budget, the county earmarked $440,000 to replace and repair the perimeter fence surrounding the jail and to build holding areas outside the jail building to confine inmates in the event of an emergency.
The jail has been considering the renovation for a while, said Ted Holteen, a spokesman for La Plata County, but other improvement projects took precedent, including a $460,000 locker room remodel last year to make the facilities usable again.
Sheriff Sean Smith sought to fix the fence in phases with an initial $150,000 going toward replacing the most critical section of fence in 2022 before completing the rest at a later date, Holteen said.
The county and its finance department found that the capital budget had room to fully fund the fence, so the sheriff’s office included a request for the money in its budget and planned to build the fence in 2022.
The upgrade was planned, and there did not appear to be any clear and immediate danger from the fence.
Then two prisoners escaped.
“It wasn't a problem until it was a problem,” Holteen said.
In the four years that Aber has led detentions, four inmates have escaped.
An inmate on work release at the Durango/La Plata Senior Center on Main Avenue escaped in 2018 by walking away from his assignment.
Marty Kelly Yazzie was caught a day later while hiding in the bushes of someone’s yard in the 100 block of Alamo Drive in Durango.
A little more than a year later, Jeramy Hopkins, an enrollee in the jail’s trustee program, which allows a select group of 22 inmates to earn “good time” and reduce their sentence, fled the jail by climbing the fence surrounding the facility while taking out the trash.
Hopkins, who was helped by family members in his escape, cleared the barbed wire atop a roughly 6-foot-high section of fence.
There were no escapes in 2020 and into 2021 before Jonah Barrett-Lesko broke out of La Plata County Jail in late September.
Of the four escapes, Barrett-Lesko’s was the least foreseeable.
Barrett-Lesko, who was being held on multiple charges and was most notably accused of animal abuse for allegedly having sexual intercourse with a horse, was alone in a concrete recreation area with roughly 15-foot-high cinderblock walls on every side.
He climbed a corner of the wall by gripping a small outcropping and wedging himself up the wall, Aber said.
He then proceeded to break through a solid steel fence wrapped in razor wire that covered about a 4-foot-wide gap between the top of the cinderblock wall and the roof of the structure and squeezed through a small hole.
Once he got down on the other side, he then climbed up and hopped a roughly 10-foot-tall fence topped with barbed wire before finally scaling a approximately 6- to 8-foot-high section of the perimeter fence again topped with barbed wire.
“That's just not something that we had ever anticipated,” Aber said. “A normal person would have a very difficult, if not impossible, (time) to be able to climb the wall the way he did ... It was just a ‘wow’ thing.”
Barrett-Lesko is the only inmate to have escaped from a recreation room, Aber said.
He was arrested about 30 minutes after his escape in the middle of the Animas River.
The jail’s second escape in 2021 happened in December when Elias Buck, another member of the trustee program, jumped over the perimeter fence while a group of inmates was taking out the trash after dinner.
After a meal, detainees who work in the kitchen as part of the trustee program are typically allowed to take a few minutes outside while taking out the trash.
Each time, the correctional food service manager counts the inmates as they go out and calls that number into the master control room inside the jail.
The manager then watches them for a few minutes, though part of their line of vision is blocked by a wall, before counting the inmates again as they come back inside.
During Buck’s escape, the manager was speaking to another inmate when Buck ventured out of sight and scaled the fence.
The manager then miscounted the number of inmates as they were going back inside, tallying 16 instead of 17, Aber said.
“It's a human mistake,” he said.
Another inmate reported someone missing and only after jail staff did a head count inside the prison did they realize that Buck was gone.
Buck was in jail on suspicion of motor vehicular theft and had been in jail on several occasions for a few months each time, but had never been a concern, Aber said.
“There’s nothing in his history that would indicate that he would be an escape risk from the jail,” he said. “When you’ve got 22 people, you don’t know what the state of mind of one of those 22 is going to be. Everybody was in shock that he did this, including us.”
“The original fence is very old and unsecure,” the Sheriff’s Office wrote in its description of the project in the county budget. “It has been in place since the jail was built and has fallen into a severe state of disrepair.”
As Aber walks the perimeter of the jail, it’s clear that the fence was never designed to be a high-security barrier.
Sections of the fence are 6 feet tall while others are 8 feet. The entire fence is topped by barbed wire, but the chain link is of varying strength. Some is industrial, while other sections were designed for residential use.
Parts of the fence have no bottom bar so anyone can lift it, though inmates have never been allowed near those sections, Aber said.
Deputies also patrol the fence at least once a day to check for cuts.
“It's just not a high-security fence,” he said.
While the fence has been in need of repair and replacement, it has never been a significant concern because inmates are not allowed near the fence without supervision and there are other security measures in place.
But some of those security measures did not work properly in the escape of Buck.
Cameras on the outside of the prison are too high and in poor locations. They are too far from the areas they need to see and poor light conditions can limit the cameras, Aber said.
The intelligent camera software the jail upgraded in early 2021 also did not work.
“We invested in the camera system after our last escape and we upgraded the cameras out there,” Aber said. “They’re supposed to tell us and send an alert to master control if anybody gets within a distance of the fence. Those were not working the way they’re supposed to be working.”
In addition to faulty software and poor placement, the county jail has more than 130 cameras, which are difficult for the approximately eight deputies and one sergeant on each shift to monitor at any one time.
The pandemic and the challenge of finding people who want to work in detentions has exacerbated that problem.
At a minimum, six staff members operate the facility that often houses about 140 inmates, and at its peak, held 281 inmates.
The jail has a total capacity of 293.
Staffing levels fluctuate, but the jail has been chronically understaffed, Aber said.
The jail has been fully staffed for only two weeks in Aber’s four years as the head of detentions, though he argues there would still be escapes.
“If we would have had nine people on that day (when Buck escaped), this would have still happened,” he said. “This was not the result of us not doing our job or having an inadequate number of staff members available.”
“The fence is not why we had somebody escape,” Aber said. “The fence is the mechanism that somebody climbed over and left.”
Still, the jail plans to replace the fence.
Aber’s vision is first and foremost a uniform barrier of the same height and quality of steel.
It will likely be 12 feet tall and will be erected outside the current one, expanding the perimeter of the jail, Aber and Holteen said.
A new concrete foundation will secure the bottom and stronger steel will prevent anyone from cutting through the fence. Three layers of concertina wire will make a V-shape at the top.
Structural plans remain fluid and will in part be determined by the contractor that installs the fence, but Aber said the replacement will address the security shortcomings.
In addition to a new fence, the jail plans to modify its surveillance system and cameras.
“We’re going to have to probably make some location moves and some height adjustments, and we’re probably going to upgrade some of the cameras,” Aber said.
Smith reached out to the Kubl Group, the security company the jail contracts with, when the jail first discovered its new intelligent surveillance system wasn’t working properly, and has been working with the company to fix the cameras, Aber said.
The security changes are significant, but inconsequential, he said.
After each escape, the jail has instituted new procedures that have further tightened security and reduced risk.
When Hopkins fled, the jail administration started the head count every time trustees went outside to empty the trash.
The recreation yard where Barrett-Lesko escaped is no longer in use.
“We implemented some procedural changes and those changes worked,” Aber said. “Then (in the case of Buck) we had an employee that made a mistake and got the wrong count.”
After Buck’s escape, the jail again instated new protocols.
The trustees are no longer allowed to go outside as a group to take out the trash.
“They lost their ability to come outside and get some fresh air,” Aber said. “Now we only allow two people to come out so it’s one-on-one supervising. Two (inmates) come out, dump the trash and immediately go back in.”
The new protocols, not a more robust fence, will stop the escapes, he said.
“If you're intent on getting out, you’re going to be able to do that if you have the time and the opportunity,” Aber said. “We have to create a situation where the opportunity is not there and the time is not there. People are the best security system.”
Though the jail has immediate plans to replace the perimeter fence, it has not identified a contractor for the project. The jail has struggled to find contractors for many of its projects amid the ongoing effects of the pandemic.
“I don’t know that we're going to be able to find a contractor to actually do it, but we’re going to do everything in our power to make it happen,” Aber said.
The procedural changes the jail made after Buck’s escape are likely permanent, though they be will reconsidered once the fence is fixed.
“We may at some point in time allow inmate workers to be back outside under supervision, but it won’t be until we get that fence issue resolved and fixed,” Aber said. “We won't go backwards.”
ahannon@durangoherald.com
