Louisiana Detainee Captured After Two Previous Escapes
Cecil Michael Stratton, 46, a detainee held at the Berwick Police Department Jail, was apprehended on November 15, 2025, after escaping from the facility earlier that week.
Around the time he was initially booked, Stratton fought with guards as the jailers were “securing [detainees] during lockdown procedures,” according to a statement from the St. Mary’s Parish Sheriff’s Office. During the “brief struggle,” a chemical substance was thrown onto a guard’s face, allowing Stratton and a second detainee, Brandon Lee Burnet, 22, to flee.
Three days after the escape, police found Stratton lying in a boat outside of a business at the nearby town of Morgan City, and Bratton was apprehended not long before.
In 2002, as local ABC affiliate WBRZ reported, Stratton was charged with marijuana possession, resisting an officer, and simple escape. Three years later, he was accused of attempted first-degree murder and attempted armed robbery and escaped from another Louisiana jail, leading police on a high-speed chase in Ouachita Parish. Following his 2025 capture, Stratton faces charges of unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure, disarming a police officer, battery on a police officer, aggravated battery and simple and aggravated escape.
Stratton’s arrest follows the mass escape of 10 detainees from the Orleans Parish Justice Center in New Orleans in May of this year. The earlier escape highlighted the inhumane conditions and crumbling infrastructure that are common at jails in Louisiana and across the country. While most of the detainees were captured within several weeks of the escape, the last escapee, Derrick Groves, 28, evaded the police for five months, being found in a crawlspace in an Atlanta, Georgia home in October 2025. [See: PLN, July 2025, p. 18; PLN, Nov. 2025, p. 57.]
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