What to Know
- Authorities are searching for an inmate described as “very dangerous” who officials say escaped from a jail in northwestern Pennsylvania using bed sheets.
- Warren police say Michael Burham was last seen wearing a blue denim coat and an orange jail jumpsuit but had likely changed clothes.
- Police say Burham was being held on arson and burglary charges and was a suspect in a homicide investigation. They say he is also associated with a prior carjacking and kidnapping of a local couple.
Authorities from local, state and federal agencies were searching Saturday for an inmate described by police as “very dangerous" who escaped from a jail in northwestern Pennsylvania using bed sheets, officials said.
Michael Burham, 34, escaped from a jail in Warren by climbing on exercise equipment and using bed sheets to escape through a window, authorities said. Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police said Burham was being held in lieu of $1 million bail on kidnapping, burglary and other charges, and Warren police said he was a suspect in a homicide investigation.
Law enforcement officials believed Burham was still in the Warren area and had likely changed clothes since he escaped wearing a blue denim coat and orange jail jumpsuit, Bivens told a Saturday news conference. Burham is “a self-taught survivalist with military experience and could be potentially holed up in a wooded area,” Bivens said.
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“He is considered very dangerous, and the public is asked to be vigilant and report anything out of the ordinary,” police said in a Facebook post.
The U.S. Marshalls Service was offering a $7,500 reward for information leading to Burham's capture, and Crime Stoppers was offering $2,000, Bivens said.
Two decades ago on the opposite side of the commonwealth, an inmate being held on murder charges after bodies were unearthed on his Wilkes-Barre property took advantage of a botched repair job and used a rope fashioned from bed sheets to shimmy down from a seventh-floor cell in the Luzerne County prison. Officials said a window repaired after a 1989 escape attempt had two panes that were too small and secured only with caulking, so they were easily broken out.
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Hugo Selenski spent three days on the lam after the October 2003 escape before turning himself in. Another inmate was injured in a fall during the escape attempt and was recaptured. Selenski beat two murder charges in a 2006 trial but was convicted of two murders in 2015 and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
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