Updated to reflect Jone’s capture
Lloyd Collins Jones, a state prison inmate convicted of murder, left the East Arkansas Regional Unit Monday dressed in white and headed to a construction site nearby, under the supervision of armed guards, to labor for a Department of Corrections work program.
Jones, 40, had served just four years of his 60-year sentence for strangling a 16-year-old girl and stuffing her in a barrel, a crime he pleaded guilty to committing in 2012.
At noon on Monday, Jones apparently decided he’d served enough time and vanished from his captors’ gaze.
On Thursday, after the FBI offered a $20,000 award for information on his whereabouts, Jones was captured in a farm field near the Mississippi River.
News of the man’s escape spread quickly online, his description and past convictions shared many times over by police and sheriffs’ departments across Arkansas. The Department of Corrections issued an alert about his escape, which happened in the small town of Brickeys, about 100 miles east of Little Rock, the state capital, according to its website.
Advertisement
“The search perimeter is focused around the escape location and adjacent areas,” department spokesman Solomon Graves said in a statement shortly before 6 p.m., reported the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The Department of Corrections escape alert described Jones as 6 feet tall and 175 pounds. He has multiple tattoos on his back and chest that include dragons, flames, a cross, a skull and a wizard. His last known address, according to the alert, is in Sebastian County, where his family lives and where he committed the murder.
On Facebook, the Sebastian County Sheriff’s Department asked for the public’s help in finding Jones.
Jones, who had previously served prison time on a 2001 rape conviction, met 16-year-old Angela Allen on a social media website called Mbuzzy in 2012, reported the Times Record. The two exchanged text messages, and on the night of Feb. 10, the last time her family saw her, Allen went with Jones to “Mud Town Bottoms,” an area along the Arkansas River.
Advertisement
They kissed, according to news reports, but Jones became angry when he learned the girl was just 16. He shoved her in the chest, authorities said, and she fell into the water.
Share this articleShareAllen’s body was found more than a week later, buried in a blue plastic barrel on a property owned by Jones’s brother, according to news reports. Investigators said the girl was strangled to death, reported TV station 5News.
Jones pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He was also sentenced to 20 years on two child pornography charges and 10 years for one child pornography charge and abuse of a corpse, reported CBS News.
The sentences were to run concurrently.
Allen’s family spoke on her behalf at the sentencing hearing, condemning Jones’s actions and speaking of the future stolen from the young teen.
Advertisement
“You’re the kind of person that shouldn’t deserve to live,” Seth Allen, Angela Allen’s brother, said in a victim impact statement, according to the Times Record. “You are a disgrace to this planet to take her out of this world when she could have changed this world.”
The girl’s mother, grandmother and two friends also read victim impact statements aloud to the court.
“Each day I pray that he also feels the pain and terror Angela felt. That in some way, each and every second he continues to live that God will allow him to gasp for breath, feeling the pressure of hands on his throat and fighting to get the pressure off his throat as I’m sure Angie fought to get his hands off her,” friend Jackie Riley said, according to news reports.
Jones said nothing before he was sentenced, reported the Times Record.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JopKiqnp67qHnMoq9or6Bkf3F9lWhnb2dhaXyurc1mqp6qpp67qHmVaWSynZGnerG%2ByKymp2Wkmr%2BuecWoqWajmaG5qrrGZquenZ5itKq%2By2acrJuRpbK0ecWrpqZlkae4orrSmqpmqKKewLC6jg%3D%3D