POLICE NAB JAIL ESCAPEE

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

A 21-year-old murder suspect escaped from the Jefferson County jail early Friday morning but was caught several hours later hiding in a storage room at a downtown motel.

Jefferson County Sheriff Gerald Robinson said Marvin Isby had been let out of his cell at about 2 a.m. Friday to use the telephone, and “was able to tamper with the locks on a door,” and make his escape.

“This had nothing to do with the security of the jail,” Robinson said about the escape, which was the first since the W.C. “Dub” Brassell Adult Detention Center opened almost two years ago. “It was negligence on the part of correctional personnel, and we are taking administrative action against the personnel who were involved.”

Robinson did not say how many employees faced administrative action.

The sheriff said procedures are in place at the detention center to allow inmates to make telephone calls, however, “he should not have been out at that time of the morning.”

“Jail personnel did not follow established procedures,” Robinson said.

Robinson said after the escape, deputies, Pine Bluff police officers, the state police and the Department of Correction were all alerted by emergency dispatchers at MECA (Metropolitan Emergency Communications Association).

“They got the information out quickly and everybody started searching for Isby,” he said. “We got a possible location (at the Crown Motel at 5th Avenue and Walnut Street), deputies and police surrounded the building, then started searching room to room, floor to floor until we found him hiding in a storage closet on the 5th floor.”

Isby had been held at the detention center since his arrest Oct. 30 on drug charges during an investigation at the same motel. While he was being processed into the center, evidence was recovered that linked him to the Sept. 9 death of Laron Foots, 22, of Pine Bluff, whose body was found lying face down near a car parked in the driveway of a former day care center at 1006 N. Maple St., near the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Chief Deputy Coroner Chad Kelley pronounced Foots dead at the scene and listed the cause of death as blunt force trauma.

At a probable cause hearing the day after Isby was arrested, Deputy Prosecutor Cymber Gieringer said police found bloody fingerprints inside and outside the car and determined that they didn’t belong to the victim.

She said the break in the case that resulted in Isby being identified as a suspect came when Crime Scene Technician Kim Phillips compared fingerprints found at the scene to those of Isby, and determined that they matched. Because he had no prior criminal record, that was the first time Isby’s prints had been put into the system, and the finding were later verified by a latent fingerprint examiner at the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory at Little Rock, she said.

Early Friday afternoon, Prosecuting Attorney Steve Dalrymple filed formal charges of capital murder, aggravated robbery and theft of property against Isby in connection with the death of Foots. Isby will be held without bond and if convicted, could be sentenced to death by lethal injection or life in prison without the possibility of parole. The case was assigned to First Division Circuit Judge Berlin Jones.

Isby is also expected to appear in court Monday for a probable cause hearing on a charge of first-degree escape, as well as to be arraigned on the murder charge.