A “strange noise” caught the attention of a Jefferson County Detention Officer and led to his discovery that inmate Tory Vincent Gee was “not in his cell” prior to his escape the night of Oct. 11, Sheriff Craig Doolittle said Friday morning a few hours prior to Gee’s capture in Lake County.
“[The detention officer] was hearing a strange noise coming from the … it sounded like it was coming from the observation cell,” Doolitle said. “So he was checking the observation cell, found it wasn’t that, and that’s when he started checking other areas of the detention center. I believe it was about [8:45 p.m.] when the detention officer noticed that [Gee’s] cell had been compromised and he was not in it.”
Doolittle would not say how the cell was compromised or how Gee escaped.
“I’m sure that we probably will at a later date, but not until this is finished,” he said.
Gee had been seen that evening as recently as about 8:30 p.m. in a day room area, Doolittle said, and prior to that during and after dinner.
Doolitlee said he believed Gee was confirmed to be “outside of the facility” shortly after 10:24 p.m., following a review of time-stamped video footage showing Gee escaping through a door on the south side of the building at that time.
Gee is still the suspect in the theft of a pickup truck reported stolen from a location south of the facility about 8:20 a.m. Saturday. Doolittle said he didn’t know when the truck might actually have been stolen and didn’t believe the truck had yet been recovered, but said that a trailer that was hooked to it was recovered near the Bull Mountain Fire Station just south of Boulder.
Doolittle said he was “pretty sure” that there have been two separate prior escapes from the facility, which was built in 1986.
