A Daring Jailbreak in Kittitas County
An Indian prisoner and a grand larceny suspect escaped through a sawed window, while a murder suspect was left behind.
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.
On Monday evening, about 6 o'clock, while an entertainment was in progress in the Kittitas county court house at Ellensburg, a man rushed into the court room and informed the sheriff that three prisoners, of whom he was one, had made their escape from the county jail. An investigation verified the report, and showed that an Indian, held for a trivial offense, and Harry McLeran, alias Leroy Belmont, charged with grand larceny, had made their escape by means of sawing off a bar of the grating from the window of the jail. J. L. Brown, sheriff of Kittitas county, was in Yakima Tuesday looking for the missing McLeran, for whose arrest a reward of $50 is offered. From all that can be learned, the object of the jail breaking was to liberate a man named Dick Lee, who is held in the Kittitas county jail awaiting a requisition, charged with committing murder in California. Lee is a large man, and was unable to get out after the bar of the grating had been filed through. From statements of the prisoners, ex-officials of the county are implicated in the jail delivery to the extent of furnishing the tools for sawing the bars.
“From statements of the prisoners, ex-officials of the county are implicated in the jail delivery to the extent of furnishing the tools.”
Jail breaks were frequent occurrences in the sparsely guarded frontier jails of Washington Territory. This story highlights the precarious nature of 19th-century law enforcement and the suspicion of corruption within local government.
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