Five months after ten inmates escaped from Orleans Parish Justice Center in New Orleans jail in May, the manhunt officially ended on Wednesday, October 8, after the final convict, Derrick Groves, was found in an Atlanta, Georgia, home.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Brian Fair of the Eastern District of Louisiana said that Groves was arrested following a coordinated operation between the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force and the Atlanta Police Department SWAT team, according to CBS News.
Authorities knew where to look for Groves after Crime Stoppers Greater New Orleans received a tip earlier this summer that led investigators to believe he was in the Atlanta area. Fair declined to specify when the tip came in because he wanted to protect the informant.
“We’ve been receiving tips all summer,” Fair said, per the outlet. “We don’t want to get somebody hurt or anything, so we’re not putting the exact time frame on when that tip came in.”
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Marshals in Louisiana eventually recruited the help of counterparts in Georgia, and officers executed a search warrant at a home in the Atlanta area that they believed Groves was staying in at the time. After noting the property was “possibly a rental home,” Fair said, “There’s a lot of follow-up work that’ll be done on this to answer those questions.”
“Normally during our fugitive work, we have at least some signs that the person is at the house — movement, running, something,” Fair said, adding the home initially appeared to be empty.
Investigators deployed gas into the home a handful of times before they discovered that Groves was hiding inside a narrow crawl space, per CBS News.
“We did have concerns maybe he wasn’t in the house,” Fair said. “But ultimately, they found him hiding in a crawl space. I believe that crawl space was in the basement … and he had put some thought and work into the hiding space he was in.”
Groves was taken into custody without injury, and no weapons were found at the scene. Though. However, investigators still plan to search the residence.
It’s currently unclear how Groves traveled from New Orleans to Atlanta, and investigators are looking into if he had help. Fair said he likely traveled by car, adding, “That’s going to be part of the follow-up work that’s going to be done now that he’s in custody.”
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Additionally, Fair believes Groves was a ringleader in the jailbreak on May 16. The inmates managed to escape by pulling a jail cell door off its tracks, removing a toilet from an empty cell and crawling through a hole in the wall before they managed to scale a fence.
According to Fulton County, Georgia, jail records viewed by CBS News, Groves was booked on fugitive from justice charges. He is expected to be extradited to Louisiana, where he will likely face additional charges related to the escape.
Groves was originally serving time for a double murder he committed in 2018.
