The Great Snohomish Jailbreak
Four prisoners, including one Indigenous man, successfully flee the Snohomish County jail, leaving authorities scrambling.
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.
Four prisoners escaped from the county jail on Friday evening last, between 7 and 7:30 o'clock. They were serving out their respective terms of sentence.
The prisoners were named Harry Sutton, Robert Falter, Frank Albright and Indian Tom.
“Four prisoners... made their successful escape from our county jail, where they were serving out their respective terms of sentence.”
In 1878, Snohomish was a rough-and-tumble frontier town where incarceration was often rudimentary and escapes were frequent. This jailbreak echoes the ongoing modern debates about the adequacy and security of regional detention facilities in the face of population growth and infrastructure challenges.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.