Early Saturday morning, an inmate at a jail in Uniontown, Ala., convulsed as if he were having a seizure. Two guards ran to his aid in a pod of about 40 inmates. As they entered, four men rushed the correctional officers and overpowered them, according to the local authorities.
Leaving behind the man who feigned distress, the four scaled three barbed wire fences, using clothes to shield themselves from the blades, and raced to a getaway vehicle about 100 yards away.
By Monday morning, two of the men had been taken into custody, Sheriff Michael Granthum of Dallas County said in an interview: Johnny Dave Harris Bush Jr., who faced charges of breaking and entering, according to court documents; and Jaden Christopher Maxwell, who had been accused in two attempted murder cases, according to the district attorney of the Fourth Judicial Circuit of Alabama.
Two others remain at large: Marquavious Billingsley, who was accused of assault after being paroled on a felony murder conviction; and Kevin Gunn, who was being held on robbery, stolen identity and gun charges.
“It did arouse my curiosity,” said Michael Perry, the interim chief of the Selma Police Department. “How did they get out of that correctional facility that easily?”
Dallas County, one of the state’s poorest, has had to house its inmates far from Selma, the county seat, since a tornado ripped apart the jail in 2023. They are sent across the state — north near the Tennessee border and south near Mobile. Most are held in lockups leased from the state’s Probation and Parole Re-entry Education Program Center in Uniontown, about 30 miles west.
The center was not designed as a prison or jail, but to ease parolees back into society, said Amanda Deem, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Parole. Dallas County leases a portion of the grounds, staffing and securing the lockup there, she said.
The arrangement has irked and unsettled residents, who see it as another example of how poverty has hampered public services. The poverty rate in Dallas County hovers around 30 percent, almost three times the national average.
Limited resources have delayed the reconstruction of the jail.
Tera Wroniak, a resident who works at Sam’s Southern Eatery in Selma, said that poverty in the region endangers all who live there.
“It is just a very broke, little city,” she said. “They need to do something to the jail in Selma instead of putting everybody in jeopardy.”
Sheriff Granthum acknowledged that escapes are undesirable. “It feels like a failure if people escape from a jail,” he said, but added this was the first jailbreak during his two terms.
At the time of the escape, Sheriff Granthum said about 200 county inmates were in the Uniontown facility.
The sheriff’s department does not allow visitation at the center, and inmates instead communicate with family and friends through a video chat and texting system. The authorities learned that inmates had planned the escape in part through that system, the sheriff said.
The jail is surrounded by fields and catfish farms. The getaway driver parked a silver Honda near a church on a country road about 100 yards from the jail, he said.
Around 1 a.m. on Saturday, the man faked his seizure inside a dormitory-style holding facility with about 50 bunk beds. Inmates knocked on a door to alert the guards. When it opened, the four men ran through, racing to the fences.
Once the men piled into the Honda, the driver sped toward Selma.Using surveillance footage, officers identified the license plate of the getaway car, and as Sheriff Granthum patrolled Selma, the silver Honda drove by around 2:30 a.m. He pulled the car over and arrested Keivona Lewis, charging her with hindering prosecution. She was also charged with assisting or permitting an escape, according to Robert H. Turner Jr., the area’s district attorney.
The escapees were not in the vehicle, but Ms. Lewis provided clues about where they might be, Sheriff Granthum said.
Later on Saturday, the authorities got a break. In Midfield, Ala., near Birmingham, license plate readers identified a vehicle that had been stolen in Selma and local officers took Mr. Bush, 29, into custody.
By Sunday evening, Mr. Maxwell, 21, had called the police and arranged to turn himself in.
Mr. Billingsley, 24, and Mr. Gunn, 19, remained free. They could be armed, Sheriff Granthum said, and desperate.