Update: Huron School District 'being cautious' after inmate escaped from prison
2:39 PM, Jan 8, 2013   |  

Charles Beeney
Written by
Argus Leader Staff and wire report


Schools in Huron remain in lockdown as authorities look for an escapee who is considered armed and dangerous.

Charles Leroy Beeney, 45, escaped from the Beadle County Regional Correctional Center at 12:45 a.m. Tuesday after holding an officer hostage, according to the Beadle County Sheriff's Department.

He is armed with a makeshift gun carrying .45 calibre shells, according to state radio. He threatened the Beadle County Correctional officer who was forced to release Beeney along with his personal clothing items. Law enforcement say they don’t believe he is still in Huron, and could be headed to Kansas or North Dakota, as he has family there.

The Huron School District has seven school buildings, and all are on alert, Superintendent Terry Nebelsick said. Students who usually attend a vocational school that sits across from the high school are attending classes in the high school Tuesday, Nebelsick said.

“We are just being cautious for the rest of the day, as far as not having the kids out on playgrounds or anything. In the last couple of hours, it looks less likely that the person is in town, but I don't have anything to confirm that,” he said. “But in the meantime, we are being cautious. … The police will try to be out and be as high profile as they can while the kids are out at the end of the day. We have one event tonight. I really believe that the threat has probably passed, but we are going to err on the side of caution.”

Police officers made their presence known this morning when students were bused in, Nebelsick said. Playgrounds are closed and students are not allowed to leave school property without parent’s discretion, he said.

“All of our schools are on lockdown until we receive information from the school resource officer that it’s safe to lift them,” Nebelsick said. “If we get to the end of the day and the situation hasn’t been resolved, we will work with police on visibility distribution."

Beeney was being held on charges out of Jerauld County and the state of Kansas.

He is a white man about 5-feet-11-inches tall and 160 pounds. He was last seen wearing blue jeans and a black Carhart coat, brown shoulder-length hair, a goatee
and tattoos on his arms.

State radio reported that Beeney could be in a white 1990 F-250 pickup with a license plate of 4CD178. Beadle County Sheriff Doug Solem confirmed the vehicle Beeney is believed to be traveling in was stolen just east of Huron.

Beeney was outside of his cell on cleaning detail in the jail about 12:30 a.m. when he accosted a guard with a makeshift gun, Solem said. Guards did not get a good look at the hand-made weapon but evidence found later in Beeney’s cell indicated it might have been made from materials such as a metal tube and rubber bands, he said.

“This guy, he had been in prison for 20 years. He’s real resourceful,” Solem said. “If the thing actually worked, who knows? But it was enough to make our guard believe it would work.”

Solem said Beeney produced a .45-caliber bullet, handed it to the guard and then told the guard he had another bullet in the makeshift gun and would kill him if the guard did not let him go.

Another guard eventually confronted Beeney, who had his weapon held to the first guard’s stomach, Solem said.

“It’s kind of like a bank robbery — when somebody has a gun pointed at you, you do what you’ve got to do,” the sheriff said. “The guard released him.”

Beeney had been in the jail since Dec. 3, when he was arrested following a chase with law enforcement officers from five counties and the South Dakota Highway Patrol. The chase ended when Beeney crashed the pickup truck he had stolen from a dealership in Bismarck, N.D., in a field west of the South Dakota town of Alpena.

“We’d had no problems with him whatsoever” since the arrest, Solem said.

Beeney also was involved in a chase with law enforcement officers in North Dakota in December 2005. He was caught and booked into the Richland County Jail but escaped later that month by using an iron post he apparently had wrenched from a piece of furniture to overwhelm a jailer. He stole a pickup from a farm and went on the lam for about 16 hours before he was caught.

In January 2006, he was sentenced to five years in the State Penitentiary in Bismarck, where he made an unsuccessful escape attempt in June 2010 — less than two months before his scheduled release.

Beeney faced only prison discipline for the attempted escape and was released on schedule because he was wanted in Kansas for violating parole on felony convictions including aggravated robbery, said Tim Tausend, a spokesman for the North Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Kansas Department of Corrections records show that Beeney returned to Kansas and served about eight months in a state prison in Lansing before he was paroled again in April 2011. He absconded from parole last November and turned up in Bismarck a month later.

As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, Solem said there have been no sightings of him.