The Last Escaped Detainee from the New Orleans Jail Was Arrested in an Atlanta Crawlspace
Derrick Groves, the last of the 10 detainees who escaped from a New Orleans, Louisiana jail in May of this year, was captured five months later, on October 15. Groves, 28, was found hiding in a crawl space in a home in Atlanta. According to police, Groves’ apprehension led to a brief standoff, in which officers from local and federal agencies swarmed the house and fired tear gas into it multiple times. Groves, who was found guilty of multiple murders, was likely facing a life sentence (he was awaiting sentencing at the time of the escape); now, as CNN reported, he is being held at the infamous Louisiana state prison known as Angola, along with the nine other detainees who participated in the brazen escape.
As PLN previously reported, the detainees exited the Orleans Parish Justice Center (the jail’s official title) around midnight through a small rectangular hole in a cell. Images showed a metal toilet and sink torn from the wall; etched above the hole was a smiley face with its tongue out and taunting messages that read “We Innocent” and “To (sic) easy LOL.” By June 2025, all of the escapees except for Groves had been captured, including Jermaine Donald, 42, and Leo Tate, 31, who led officers on a high-speed chase in Walker County, Texas and Antoine Massey, 32, who went viral after posting videos on social media in which he appealed to rapper Lil Wayne and Pres. Donald Trump (R) for help.
The escape would not have been so easy if the New Orleans jail was not long plagued by overcrowding, understaffing, security concerns, and crumbling infrastructure. Roughly one-third of the jail’s cameras were reportedly broken, and the jail had been holding around 1,400 detainees, a number well beyond the 1,250 that a city ordinance mandates. As PLN reported, these conditions led to a class-action lawsuit that resulted in a 2013 consent decree and the construction of a new jail facility; that decree was largely ignored for more than a decade [See: PLN, June 2024, p. 51].
Additional sources: The New York Times, NPR
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