John Griffin Jr. was caught at about 6 a.m. Saturday by officials from the Lexington County Sheriff's Department, State Law Enforcement Division and De-partment of Corrections. He is now being held at Broad River Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Columbia, said Robert Ward, director of operations for the Corrections Department. He was captured without incident at 260 Victor Road in rural Lexington near the town of Gaston by SLED's SWAT team, said SLED Chief Robert Stewart.
Shawn Wiles, the inmate who escaped with Griffin on the morning of Dec. 19, was captured Friday night after a three-hour standoff in Saluda, Stewart said. Wiles drove past police at more than 100 mph and then fled his car before running into a building where he was eventually found hiding in a ceiling, Stewart said. He is being held at Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia.
Police have arrested two people from the 260 Victor Road mobile where Griffin was caught on Saturday, Stewart said. Sabrina K. Bailey, 20, and Joe Blackmon, 17, were charged with harboring an escapee and were being held at the Lexington County Detention Center. Another female who was with Wiles when he was captured also had been charged with harboring a fugitive.
Both inmates, serving sentences for nonviolent crimes, had engineered their most recent escape from separate maximum-security cells, where they were confined for 23 hours a day. The Ridgeland prison is medium security, but the inmates were being held in a special maximum security lockdown after they escaped on Nov. 19 using a makeshift ladder to scale a razor wire-topped fence, Corrections spokesman John Barkley has said.
Ward did not reveal their latest method of escape, nor how it was coordinated utilizing no means of direct communication with each other in the lockdown unit, but said only that the incident remained under investigation. The men again have been placed in maximum security conditions at their respective prisons.
Wiles is in the "super-max" at Kirkland, "a 50-bed unit that has the most dangerous and the most violent inmates most prone to escape in our entire system, so it's a prison within that maximum security prison," Ward said. Wiles, 24, was to be eligible for parole in April. He is serving four years for possession of a stolen vehicle, but now faces additional charges including two escape charges that each could carry an additional one to 15 years in prison.
Griffin, 20, who is serving 12 years for second-degree burglary, is under lockdown at Broad River, Ward said. He, too, faces two escape charges.