text: Dannemora 
   
   A violent melee between two factions of inmates broke out in a recreation yard at Clinton Correction Facility five days before two inmates on an "honor block" used tools to cut their way out of the maximum security prison. 
   
   The fight took place June 1 when two groups of inmates — some of whom were Muslim and others who were suspected members of the Bloods gang — began fighting, according to a person briefed on the case. 
   
   Correction officers in two towers overlooking the yard fired canisters of chemical agents into the middle of the fight, which ended in less than a minute, the person said. An inmate suffered a broken leg. Part of the prison was locked down the next day, four days before the escape, but only the yard and two cellblocks were searched, rather than the entire prison, which houses about 3,000 inmates. Five weapons were found during the searches. 
   
   A person close to the case said some correction officers are questioning whether a request to lock down and search the entire facility was rebuffed by Department of Corrections and Community Supervision headquarters in Albany. 
   
   A spokesperson for DOCCS on Tuesday said no information about the operations at the prison is being released while the investigation into the escape, and the search for the escaped inmates, continues. 
   
   The two inmates, Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 34, used a small electrical saw, powered by extension cords, and a sledgehammer to cut and pound their way to freedom from inside the prison not far from the Canadian border. 
   
   A law enforcement source briefed on the case said State Police investigators are probing whether the inmates may have received the small hand-held saw and other tools from a female civilian employee who had developed a relationship with Matt. The items would have been smuggled into the prison. 
   
   Employees at state prisons are not required to pass through metal detectors when they enter the facilities, although bags and purses are supposed to be searched. There is a size limit on the bags that employees carry into the facilities, but it is rarely enforced, according to an official with the state DOCCS. 
   
   Matt and Sweat used the saw and hand-held blades to cut holes through metal walls in the back of their adjacent cells on an "honor block" tier. The holes they cut led to a cavernous utility bowel inside the prison where the men spliced an electrical cord into a light fixture to power the saw they then used to cut a large hole in a 24-inch steam pipe that led to a sewer outside the prison, said the source, who is not authorized to comment publicly on the case. They cut their way into the pipe because climbing through it was the only way to get past the outer prison wall, the source said. 
   
   As a massive manhunt continues in the heavily forested areas around the prison in Dannemora, the investigation has zeroed in on a female employee who worked for several years in a prison tailor shop with Matt and Sweat. Published reports said investigators have visited the woman's home. A person close to the case said investigators are also examining whether the employee or someone else may have given Matt access to a cellphone. Correction officers briefed on the case said police believe the escapees had arranged with someone to pick them up a block from the prison, but that their alleged accomplice backed out. 
   
   When they climbed out of a sewer hole near the prison around midnight Friday, they were on foot and the initial search focused on a tight radius in the area of the prison. 
   
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   Prison employees, including correction officers, support staff and administrators, are prohibited from having personal relationships with inmates. 
   
   The manhole covers are locked from the inside to prevent them from being stolen. But the person briefed on the case said the inmates apparently used a 20-pound sledgehammer to break the cover's lock. It's unclear how they obtained the sledgehammer. The men carried their tools into the bowels of the prison in a guitar case that they kept in one of their cells. Two witnesses reported seeing two men in the back yard of a house just after midnight Friday, including one who was carrying a guitar case. The men were discovered missing from their cells at 5:30 a.m. Saturday. 
   
   Being on an honor block gave the inmates more liberties, including the ability to cook and visit other inmates' cells at times. 
   
   The looser restrictions on the honor block tier may have been a factor in their meticulous escape plan. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who visited the prison Saturday, questioned how other inmates on the tier could not have heard the sawing, suggesting sarcastically they must be "heavy sleepers." 
   
   Matt and Sweat, both of whom were convicted of murder, had piled clothing and other items under their bed linens to make it appear they were sleeping, state officials said. 
   
   The FBI is assisting in the search, and a law enforcement source said authorities believe the men, with their escape plan altered, could still be within a five- or 10-mile radius of the prison. The inmates' assignment on the honor block allowed them to wear and keep regular clothing other than their prison uniforms. The person briefed on the case said the green prison uniforms were found left behind. 
   
   blyons@timesunion.com • 518-454-5547 • @blyonswriter ||||| The only son of convicted murderer and prison escapee Richard W. Matt finds it hard to believe authorities failed to take greater precautions in making sure his father remained behind bars. 
   
   “You know he has escaped before. He has a genius IQ. I can’t believe they let this happen,” said 23-year-old Nicholas Harris, who recalled his father bragging to him and his mother about how he had attempted to escape from a Mexican prison and ended up being shot. 
   
   “He said he made it up to the roof of the prison and got shot in the shoulder. He pulled down his shirt and showed us the bullet wound. This guy has bullet holes on his body. He’s been shot like nine times. It’s like they can’t kill him. He showed me the scars on his forearms from another time he escaped,” Harris said Monday during an interview outside his family’s Southtowns residence, where he cares for his disabled mother. 
   
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   Photo gallery: Where WNY’s notorious criminals are locked up 
   
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   As a frantic, nationwide manhunt was underway Monday after Matt and convicted cop killer David P. Sweat escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in the Adirondacks, Harris said he hopes the father that he knows just well enough to be afraid of does not make his way to this end of New York State. 
   
   Harris says the family stories about his father, who also has a daughter, are frightening. 
   
   “My father broke into my mother’s house in Tonawanda and beat her,” Harris said. “I was an infant when it happened.” 
   
   Police records substantiate that attack. 
   
   Matt, according to his son, seemed doomed from the start to be on the wrong side of the law. 
   
   “He was left as an infant in a car. Everybody is born innocent, but he was raised around crime. Then he went into foster care,” Harris said. 
   
   A Buffalo police source said that Matt’s father was frequently arrested decades ago in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. 
   
   “I arrested him at different times and I can tell you the father was a piece of garbage,” the police source said. 
   
   In the City of Tonawanda, where Matt and his older brother, Robert, ended up being raised in foster care, a resident on the block where they lived also said that Matt’s father was often in trouble with the law and that was why the boys ended up in foster care placement. 
   
   Matt’s brother and father are deceased, Harris and acquaintances of the family said. 
   
   As for Harris’ early recollections of his father, he says they are vague. Richard Matt was in and out of prison. But Harris says he has clear memories of meeting his father several years ago at the Niagara County Jail in Lockport. 
   
   “He makes an impression that lingers with you,” said Harris, who is on a leave of absence from college to care for his mother. “My father has always wanted to have a relationship with me.” 
   
   And so after Matt was brought back here in 2007 from Mexico, where he had been arrested years earlier and jailed without a trial for killing a man in a barroom fight, Harris visited his father. That’s when Matt regaled his then-teenage son with the story of his attempted Mexican jailbreak, Harris said. 
   
   Harris also got a look at the scars on his father’s forearms from a 1986 escape at the Erie County Correctional Facility in Alden. 
   
   Showing an old snapshot of his father to a Buffalo News reporter, Harris pointed to a forearm in the photograph and said, “Look, you can see the scars.” 
   
   Matt had scaled a correctional facility wall and a gate topped with razor wire, slicing up his arms, for what amounted to five days of freedom before he was caught in his brother’s City of Tonawanda apartment. 
   
   During the jailhouse meeting with his father, Harris said Matt appeared “weighed down” from years of being in and out of jail. And there was no end in sight to Matt’s incarceration. A Niagara County jury in 2008 convicted him of abducting, beating, torturing, murdering and dismembering William L. Rickerson, 76, in December 1997. Matt had avoided a criminal trial at that time by fleeing to Mexico, only to be arrested there in 1998 for the fatal barroom fight. 
   
   Harris said that although he wrote a letter to his father after their only visit, he decided that a relationship was not for him. 
   
   “I was raised by a stepfather,” he said. “I was mature enough at that age to know I already had a father figure. I decided a relationship would not be healthy.” 
   
   But not everything Harris knows about his biological father, four years younger than his mother, troubles him. Perhaps the only time the young, dark-haired man with an uncanny resemblance to Matt smiled was in telling how Matt romantically pursued his mother, Vee Marie Harris. 
   
   “My mother grew up in Tonawanda and knew him from when he was a kid. He had a crush on my mother and would say to her, ‘If I were older, would you be my girl?’ ” Harris said. “He’d lower his head and kick his foot against the ground when he asked. She would tell him he was so young. But then she met him later when he was in his 20s and he was a good-looking guy. They started dating and she got pregnant with me.” 
   
   Harris says he learned of his father’s escape from the state prison over the weekend when a large contingent of New York State Police and Homeland Security officials arrived at his family’s home in Angola. 
   
   Matt, 49, and Sweat, 35, convicted of killing a Broome County sheriff’s deputy in 2002, were reportedly last seen in the maximum security prison, situated not far from the Canadian border, at 10:30 p.m. Friday. They were unaccounted for during a 5:30 a.m. bed check on Saturday. Authorities determined that the two inmates, who were in the honor section of the prison, had used power tools to cut through steel pipes to make their escape. 
   
   State police, Harris said, asked him and his 53-year-old mother to contact them if they learn anything about Matt’s whereabouts. 
   
   “I couldn’t believe it when the State Police and Homeland Security showed up. I thought I had done something wrong and they were coming for me,” Harris said of his initial shock at having so many members of law enforcement at his home. 
   
   Throughout the weekend, Harris said, he watched television footage of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo checking the escape route his father and Sweat took inside Clinton Correctional Facility. 
   
   “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. 
   
   Harris said he has no idea what his father’s intentions are, but points out that his mother is ill and does not need any more heartache. 
   
   And while he doubts his father would surrender, Harris said, “I’m hoping for the best outcome for everyone involved.” 
   
   There is a $100,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Matt and Sweat. And as of late Monday, State Police continued to remind the public that the two men are “very dangerous individuals” and any suspicious activity should be reported to 911 or (518) 563-3761. 
   
   email: lmichel@buffnews.com ||||| The search for two convicted murderers who broke out of prison brought investigators Tuesday to a tiny town in upstate New York after a local resident reported seeing two men walking along a country road late Monday night. 
   
   “A report was called in by a citizen of two suspicious men walking down a very rural road in the southern part of our town in the middle of a driving rainstorm,” Shaun Gillilland, the town supervisor in...
target: – Authorities are swarming the small upstate New York town of Willsboro to find the two convicted killers who escaped from prison last week, reports the Wall Street Journal. A motorist spotted two men walking on a "very rural" road last night, and they took off into the fields when he stopped, say police. Willsboro is about 35 miles from where Richard Matt and David Sweat busted out of the Clinton Correctional Facility. More details are filling in on the great escape, too. The leading theory is that a female employee of the prison who worked with the two men in its tailor shop smuggled in a small electrical saw and perhaps other tools such as a sledgehammer, reports the Albany Times Union. The woman also may have provided access to a cell phone after striking up a relationship with Matt. The men reportedly used the saw to cut holes in the metal walls of their cells, and the holes "led to a cavernous utility bowel inside the prison where the men spliced an electrical cord into a light fixture to power the saw they then used to cut a large hole in a 24-inch steam pipe that led to a sewer outside the prison," the Albany paper reports. The final barrier to freedom was a lock on the inside of a manhole cover, which they bashed with a sledgehammer. Authorities say the woman or someone else might have had second thoughts and scrapped a plan to pick them up Friday night. This is Matt's third escape attempt, his son tells the Buffalo News. The first was from a prison near Buffalo in 1986 (he climbed a wall and remained free for five days) and the second was in 1997 after he got captured in Mexico. “He said he made it up to the roof of the prison and got shot in the shoulder," says his son, who adds that his father has a "genius IQ."