Two Mississippi Prisoners Escape in One Month
The Mississippi Department of Corrections (DOC) confirmed that prisoner Drew Johnson, 33, was back in custody on December 25, 2024, a day after escaping from South Mississippi Correctional Institution. It was the second DOC prisoner escape of the month; Gregory Trigg, 45, escaped from the Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP) on December 9, 2024, and was recaptured two days later.
Johnson is serving life without parole after pleading guilty to the murder of Calvin Holloway, Jr., 25, who was found fatally stabbed in a field outside Memphis in April 2016. While detained for that in the Shelby County Jail, Johnson also set fire to the lockup twice in May 2019 and struck a fellow prisoner with a brick in December 2021, all of which he admitted in his February 2022 guilty plea. After his escape, George County Sheriff Mitchell Mixon warned in a Facebook post that the prisoner was “desperate and very very dangerous.”
Trigg is serving 61 years for nine sentences, including armed robbery, two kidnapping counts and residential burglary, plus conspiracy to commit a crime and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. The DOC provided few details about his escape, the first from the MSP since January 2020. It was not, however, Trigg’s first escape. He took an unscheduled two-day break from custody in October 2017 while awaiting a court date in Scott County. After his most recent breakout, Trigg was found and recaptured in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some 400 miles from the MSP. Again, DOC officials provided no other details.
Sources: CBS News, Clarion-Ledger, New York Times, WKRG
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