An Inside Job at the County Jail
Two prisoners, a clerk accused of theft and an embezzling stevedore, escaped the King County jail by cutting their way out with tools smuggled from the outside.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Sheriff McGraw was very much surprised yesterday morning when on visiting the jail as usual, he found that two of the prisoners there confined had made their escape during the night. They were Shawl, the Jew arrested for stealing $60 of a customer in a store where he was clerking, and who was tried for the crime and on a disagreement of the jury was remanded to jail. The other fellow was a stevedore named Brown, arrested in Island county for embezzlement and sent to the King county jail to await his trial. Brown was considered a jolly fellow and had a boat of friends among the longshoremen and certain other classes along the Sound, and it was doubtless owing to his popularity that the tools with which the escape was made were furnished. 'Curly,' an intelligent Indian who is serving out his sentence and who was in jail at the time, tells the following story: About 1 o'clock somebody from the outside passed in a saw and some other tools, and Shawl and Brown commenced work. They sawed the hinges off the door leading into the corridor where I was with pieces of wood from their bunks. They pried the door open. They were afraid I would give the alarm, so they tied my hands with a rope, threw me down and kicked me, and finally threw me into a cell and locked me in. They then cut the hinges to the big door, pried it down, and left. I think they got out about 2 o'clock. I don't know which way they went, and I don't know who it was that passed in the tools. I am the only prisoner left, and I am almost afraid to stay in jail alone. I think I'll ask the Sheriff to have someone to come and stay with me tonight. At this juncture Sheriff McGraw appeared and 'Curly' ceased to speak further on the subject.
“Brown was considered a jolly fellow and had a boat of friends among the longshoremen and certain other classes along the Sound.”
This 1888 account of a jailbreak highlights the revolving-door nature of early Seattle's justice system, where social connections—and a bit of bribery—could easily subvert the law. It serves as a stark reminder of how public infrastructure like jails were frequently compromised by the very community networks they were built to contain.
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