Press reports have revealed that two Irish brothers escaped from the notorious San Juan de Los Morros prison outside Caracas, Venezuela by just walking out the front door in the middle of the day.
Leigh and Dermot O’Neill escaped less than a year into their 11 year sentence for drug trafficking. The San Juan de Los Morros prison with a capacity of 250 inmates holds some 1,000 prisoners. The prison director probably was unaware that the brothers were gone until Irish and British press reports of their escape surfaced.
Leigh, 25, and Dermot, 21, had been in the company of fellow Irishman Martin Beirne, 28, who died in a Caracas hotel room when cocaine-filled balloons in his stomach broke open in March 2012. The two brothers fled but were soon arrested. Leigh then pooped 92 balloons filled with 725 grams of cocaine. He pled guilty to drug trafficking. While no drugs were found on Dermot and he proclaimed his innocence, both were sentenced last October to 11 years in prison.
It is believed that Leigh and Dermot bribed their way out of the prison. The brothers walked out of San Juan de Los Morros together with another inmate. They caught a bus that took them to the countryside where they stayed at the home of their fellow escapee’s mother. Then the brothers made their way to Columbia where they stayed about a week before returning back home to Ireland. It seems obvious that they were able to obtain quite a bit of money while in prison and afterwards in Columbia.
More than 400 inmates are killed inside Venezuelan prisons every year. Most of the killings result from cellblock battles between rival prison gangs. The gangs routinely bribe guards to smuggle in firearms. There is even a video posted online by a former inmate showing gang members inside a prison firing automatic weapons into the air.
Compared to Venezuelan prisons, America’s prisons are peaceful havens. But our courts keep ruling that conditions in our prisons are unconstitutionally overcrowded and inhumane.
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