Manhunt underway for 4 escaped South Carolina inmates

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Four Chesterfield County detention inmates kicked down a steel door to escape the jail at 11 p.m. Monday, according to Chesterfield County Sheriff Cambo Streater.

But he says county detention officers didn’t notice until the head count Tuesday morning around 5:30. Head counts are done twice a day – one in the morning and one in the evening.

Streater says the inmates’ 5-6 hour lead on officials affected their response to the manhunt.

“We’re running down every lead on where these four individuals are, where they are, and how they got there,” Streater said.

Emanuel Robson Planco, Anton Conway Bennett, Kyonne Marquise McLeod, and De’Shawn Malik Fox are on the loose. Sheriff Streater says officials believe the men had help getting out and transported to the next location.

He also believes they’ve changed clothes since they’ve been out making it harder to be recognized.

“It was not detected until about 530 this morning when they went to do a hard count the do hard camp twice a day. So, they had a five to six-hour head start on us and that affected how we respond to our manhunt, so to speak,” Streater said.

Three of the inmates are in for nonviolent property crimes, the fourth has a violent crime but Streater says it wasn’t murder. This is not the first time inmates have escaped the jail under Streater’s watch.

Two inmates escaped in 2022, in June 2023, an inmate accused of murder escaped through a barred window in the detention center and another inmate escaped through a door that was propped open earlier this year.

“We fixed the security issues with [Emmanuel] Bedford. That was a window that had been there for like 50 to 60 years and nobody had ever gotten out of it. And there were really small bars like that wide. And somehow or another, he got out. So, we but we fix that. That will not happen again. So we’re investigating what happened last night,” Streater said.

Streater says there are 130 inmates in the detention center and about five officers to watch over them. Streater is confident the inmates will be caught and he says that’ll be another 1-15 years tacked on their sentence.

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