ROCKFORD, Ill., April 10, 2020 – The operator of a homeless shelter who tipped police to two Wisconsin prison escapees said they knocked on the shelter’s door about 8:30 in the morning. They were shivering in the 30-degree cold, said Karly Rice. “They looked just like the kind of people we want to help, but they weren’t,” she said. Rice, who herself has sent time behind bars on drug charges, said she recognized their prison-issue gray sweatpants and thermal underwear tops. Also, curiously, they had emergency blankets stuffed under their clothing. They asked for fresh clothes, she said. She recognized them from a Wisconsin friend’s social media post the night before. She offered them coffee and cigarettes, excused herself, and called 911. “I was trembling,” she recalled. She put on a coat to cover her shaking hands while she waited for police. The cops arrived within minutes. Rice said her sympathy for homeless people goes back to her childhood. Her mother was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Los Angeles in 2003 when they were both homeless and living on Skid Row. But these guys, she said, conjured little sympathy. She had read online about why they were in prison, one of them for sexual assault.
Earlier: Escapees arrested without resisting
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