Idaho police on Thursday caught a white supremacist prisoner and the man who helped him escape from custody at a hospital a day earlier, authorities said, with investigators now trying to establish if the pair are responsible for two killings reported after the violent breakout.
Skylar Meade, the 31-year-old fugitive inmate, and 28-year-old Nicholas Umpehnour, the alleged gunman who shot two corrections officers at the Boise hospital where Meade escaped, were arrested in the city of Twin Falls on Thursday afternoon after a short car chase, according to the Boise Police Department. The men had been housed together in prison at times and were both members of the same gang—the Aryan Knights—authorities said.
Two homicides, in Nez Perce County and Clearwater County, in which both victims were men, are now being investigated in connection with the escape, with police saying shackles were found at one of the crime scenes.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Clearwater County Sheriff’s Office said deputies responding to a request for a welfare check at around 8 p.m. Wednesday “found a deceased male,” adding that the suspects had been out of the county for “several hours” when the call was made.
Meade had been serving a 20-year sentence for shooting at a sheriff’s sergeant during a chase. Officials said he was taken from the Idaho Maximum Security Institution to the hospital after he’d injured himself. Shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday, corrections officers in the ambulance bay of Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center were ambushed as they prepared to return Meade to prison.
One of the officers allegedly shot by Umphenour was in a critical condition after the attack, while another sustained serious but non-life-threatening injuries, police said. A third corrections officer was also injured when Boise police responding to reports of an active shooter at the hospital fired at an armed person close to the entrance of the hospital, authorities said.
Corrections Department director Josh Tewalt said the department is now reviewing its own policies in the wake of the escape.
“What we know, with near certainty, this was not an accident,” Tewalt said, according to NBC News. “This was a planned event. And we’re channeling every resource we have into trying to understand exactly how they went about planning it.”
