Oklahoma Prisoner Who Escaped Through Hole Killed by Sheriff
Joshua Butler—a prisoner serving a life sentence who escaped from the Okfuskee County Jail in Okemah, Oklahoma—was shot and killed by state troopers during a traffic stop on December 31, 2025. Butler had escaped on December 20, but none of the guards at the jail realized he was missing until five days later, on Christmas Day.
According to Okfuskee County Sheriff Logan Manshack, Butler removed a wall-mounted sink from his cell, concealed the hole, and broke through a concrete wall to access a plumbing chase. The prisoner then left the jail via an exterior door with a faulty lock. “We had a water leak on the inside that damaged the lock and froze it open basically,” Manshack told News On 6, claiming that repairing the lock proved difficult because it is a model that’s no longer produced.
Manshack added, “The door itself, pretty much, the way the lock was frozen open, so more or less he just busted through it … You have the plumbing chase inside, which is very narrow in itself. I couldn’t make it through there. And then you have the interior wall and that’s what he chiseled through was the interior wall.”
The jail, built only five years ago, is already deteriorating. Butler’s escape follows several other cases of jail breaks made possible by crumbling infrastructure in 2025. Most notably, in May, ten detainees escaped through a hole behind a cell toilet above which they wrote “To [sic] Easy Lol.” [See: PLN, July 2025, p.18.]
Source: News On 6
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