As legislation officers search Arkansas’ rugged Ozark mountains for a former police chief and convicted killer who escaped jail this weekend, the sister of one in every of his victims is on edge.
Grant Hardin, the previous police chief within the small city of Gateway close to the Arkansas-Missouri border, was serving prolonged sentences for homicide and rape and have become referred to as the “Satan within the Ozarks”.
Hardin escaped on Sunday from the north central unit in Calico Rock by disguising himself and sporting a “makeshift outfit designed to imitate legislation enforcement”, state jail officers mentioned in a press release.
Cheryl Tillman, whose brother James Appleton was killed by Hardin in 2017, mentioned she and different relations are alarmed since they had been witnesses in his court docket proceedings.
“We had been there at his trial when all that went down, and he seen us there, he is aware of,” she instructed the Related Press on Tuesday.
Sheriff’s deputies in a number of northern Arkansas counties have been working with state jail officers to observe leads and search the rugged terrain within the Ozarks, Izard county sheriff, Charley Melton, mentioned in an replace late Monday.
“To the residents of Izard county and surrounding counties, please keep vigilant, lock your home and car doorways and report any suspicious exercise by calling 911 instantly,” Melton mentioned. Different sheriffs had been issuing related warnings about Hardin, who was the main focus of a 2023 documentary, Satan within the Ozarks.
Gateway, the city of about 450 folks the place Hardin briefly was the police chief in 2016, is in the identical massive county because the headquarters of retail big Walmart in Bentonville. Nevertheless, Gateway and the north-east a part of the county is way extra rural and distant than Bentonville. The panorama solely will get extra rugged to the east, into the center of the Ozarks and the Buffalo Nationwide River, towards Izard county the place the escape occurred.
Tillman mentioned she wasn’t shocked when she heard that Hardin had escaped. However the information immediately added contemporary ache for her and different members of the family after coping with the grief from the killing.
“He’s simply an evil man,” she mentioned. “He’s no good for society.”
Hardin pleaded responsible in October 2017 to first-degree homicide for fatally taking pictures Appleton, 59. Appleton labored for the Gateway water division when he was shot within the head on 23 February 2017, close to Garfield. Police discovered Appleton’s physique inside a automotive.
Investigators on the time didn’t launch a motive for the killing and Hardin was sentenced to 30 years in jail. He’s additionally serving 50 years in jail for the 1997 rape of an elementary college trainer in Rogers north of Fayetteville.
Hardin had been held in Calico Rock since 2017.
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