Deputies say inmates attempted jail escape with hacksaw

HOT SPRING COUNTY, AR - Hot Spring County Jailer Dustin Burnett headed out for a perimeter check he'll probably never forget. Outside a storage room, he heard a strange noise.

"He hears what appeared to be a sawing sound and he walked through the door right there and came around to where I'm at right here and bent down, looked in here, and he saw a saw blade going up and down," said Jail Administrator George Wright from inside the storage room.

Using security cameras, jailers say they spotted two inmates on the other end of the saw. Michael Longoria, charged with forgery; and Anthony Gonzales, charged with burglary. That's when jailers moved in to investigate.

"Right there they're just looking to see what we're doing," said Wright while watching the surveillance footage. "This one right here is talking a little trash."

Now though, it's the jailers who can talk trash if they want to thanks to new security measures put in place at the jail after the last successful escape.

"Previously to this," said Wright, "we wouldn't of had any idea who was doing anything."

For starters, jailers only recently started doing perimeter checks. Also, there are a lot of new cameras in the jail now. Inmates are pretty much visible at all times. Meaning, saw or not, inmates will be seen if they try to escape.

"There's always gonna be people trying to escape when they're in jail," said Wright, "but they have a much harder job ahead of them now."

So now the question is, how did the inmates get the saw in the first place? Jailers think a contractor left it behind after fixing the skylights in the jail. The skylights had to be fixed because that's how the last inmate escaped successffully.