A former police chief, who was convicted of murder and rape, was captured on Friday after escaping from a prison in Arkansas last week. He was found less than two miles from where he escaped.
Grant Hardin’s identity was confirmed by fingerprints, the Izard County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post announced his recapture.
On May 25, Hardin, 56, left the North Central Unit in Calico Rock. He was wearing an outfit that looked like a Department of Corrections uniform, which misled a prison officer into opening a gate and allowing him to leave, as reported by CrimeOnline.
Hardin was serving a 30-year sentence for a murder committed in 2017 and an additional 50-year term for raping a school teacher in 1997. He admitted guilt for both of these crimes in 2018.
He served as Gateway’s police chief for about four months in early 2016 and had been a Eureka Springs police officer in the mid-1990s, resigning when he was reportedly told he was going to be fired for lying in a police report. He also served as a Benton County constable from 2009-2010 and 2013-2014 and a corrections officer in Fayetteville.
Elite search teams had been scouring the rugged Ozark Mountains for the missing inmate — and even believed he had fled the state — since his apparently easy escape, but in the end, he was found just a mile and a half away from the prison, the sheriff’s office said.
The state Department of Corrections said Hardin was taken into custody shortly after 3 p.m. on Friday near Moccasin Creek in Izard County.
“Tracking dogs were able to pick up a scent in the area, and Hardin was apprehended a short time later,” the department said.
