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The Nebraska State Patrol is continuing its search for escaped prisoner Michael McGuire who held two corrections officers at gun point and drove away from a hospital where he was receiving tests Tuesday.
He acquired the two handguns in a hospital restroom where they were planted and waiting for him.
McGuire remained at large, as reports trickled in of possible Omaha sightings of the convicted rapist and kidnapper. McGuire was recorded on a surveillance camera at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, authorities said Thursday.
He is considered armed and dangerous.
McGuire’s attorney, James Martin Davis of Omaha, said it is unlikely that McGuire will let himself be captured and go back to his secluded life in an 8-by-10 cell.
Davis said. “In his mind, he’s either going to be successful in his escape or he’s not going to go back. He’s going to take his own life.”
Description:
Blond hair, blue eyes;
last seen wearing khaki shirt, khaki pants and brown coat.
Age: 54
Height: 5-foot-7
Weight: 170 pounds
Two handguns were waiting in a hospital restroom after McGuire finished a medical test Tuesday morning.
It all began at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday when McGuire left in a state van for the Johnson County Hospital in Tecumseh. The hospital, where McGuire was to undergo a CT scan, is less than 3 miles from the prison.
He was accompanied by two unarmed guards.
“It’s been a long-standing policy, throughout the department for years, that staff do not wear weapons on transportation orders,” Warden Fred Britten said.
Shortly after he underwent the scan, McGuire asked to use the restroom. It is believed that two handguns, including a black .22-caliber semiautomatic with eight to 10 rounds of ammunition, were hidden and waiting for McGuire in the restroom, said Capt. Dave Lamprecht of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office.
McGuire took one of the guns. The other was found afterward by hospital staff, said Steve King of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
It is unknown whether McGuire had an accomplice or how the guns got into the restroom, Collins said.
McGuire escorted the two officers out of the hospital at gunpoint. They drove more than an hour.
The guards, whose names were not released, were found handcuffed to a tree near U.S. Highway 75 and Beach Road in Cass County, Collins said.
The officers were discovered by a passer-by about 11:30 a.m. They had been there about 45 minutes, Lamprecht said.
Omaha attorney James Martin Davis said Tuesday night that his wife took a call from McGuire giving directions to where the guards were. They already had been found by then. McGuire, who was serving up to 193 years in prison. He could be anywhere, said Deb Collins, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska State Patrol.
“He’s obviously mobile (on foot or in a car). With the van being found in Omaha, we will search there, but he has the possibility of being found in a number of different places,” she said.
McGuire was an inmate at the Tecumseh State Prison, a maximum security facility that opened in 2001. Intended to be home to some of the state’s most dangerous inmates, it came with all the newest security measures, including two razor-wired fences, motion detectors and video cameras.
McGuire had been in the prison’s segregation unit, known as “the Hole,” since an earlier prison escape from the State Penitentiary in Lincoln in 2001.
Source: Neb. State Patrol; UNO; AP; The Omaha World-Herald