Bleak Beauty Blog

The Great Prison Escape from New York’s Dannemora Penitentiary is over. Richard Matt and David Sweat had been alluding capture in the dense Adirondack woods as a thousand men, many of them New York State Troopers, and dogs failed to find them , in one of the biggest manhunts in New York history. Matt and Sweat were getting food and shelter from empty hunting camps, most of which held supplies of food. Matt was found first and executed with three shots to the head by a border patrol agent after Matt allegedly refused to drop a shotgun. I doubt if the agent asked twice. A dastardly act of revenge, for this convict had managed to make fools of the entire police and prison apparatus of New York state for weeks. Matt turns out to have been a prison artist, someone who traded paintings for favors from a guard. The younger inmate, thirty- five year old David Sweat, apparently parted with Matt a few days prior as Matt, older and limping, was “slowing him down.” A few days later a single state trooper spotted Matt walking near a field a few miles from the Canadian border, and when Matt ran, the trooper, a good shot, shot Sweat twice, hitting him in “the torso”, which is the NYTs’ parlance for shooting him in the back. Matt, critically wounded, was then handcuffed and two troopers lifted his head up for a photograph while another knelt by him to make sure his own picture will be made with the wounded escapee. This is of course what hunters do after killing a deer, an elk, or a bear; only in this picture, which the NYTs had no trouble running, the hunter’s pose is being done with a live human being. Pretty shameful guys. If ISIS had made the picture of the critically wounded David Sweat, or if any of our “enemies” had done this, holding up the head of a wounded American soldier for a trophy picture, we would consider it a violation of the Geneva Convention and a war crime. So much for the human rights of prisoners. It wasn’t until two days after Sweat’s capture that the NYTs finally did a story saying in effect everyone was rooting for the inmates, even people in upstate New York, one of them saying “it’s the most exciting thing that ever happened here.” American democracy is boring us to death. Here two people actually do something exciting and what do we do? Shoot one in the head three times and the other in the back twice. I’m looking to a great reporter to get to Sweat before HBO does, so we can learn his version of his great run for freedom.

And don’t forget to check out Like A Thief’s Dream, the self told story of James Ray Renton’s escape from the Arkansas’s Penitentiary’s Tucker Max. http://www.bleakbeauty.com/book%20pages/thiefsdream.html