This photo provided by Idaho Department of Corrections shows Skylar Meade. Photo / AP
This photo provided by Idaho Department of Corrections shows Skylar Meade. Photo / AP
A white supremacist Idaho prison gang member and an accomplice remained on the loose on Wednesday (US time) after the accomplice staged a brazen overnight attack to free the inmate as he was being transported from a Boise hospital, police said.
Three corrections officers were shot and wounded — two by the accomplice and one by responding police — during the attack in the ambulance bay at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Centre.
Three Idaho corrections officers were shot as a suspect staged a brazen attack to break Skylar Meade, a prison inmate, out of the Boise hospital overnight. Photo / AP
Police throughout the region were looking for the suspected shooter — still unidentified as of Wednesday afternoon — as well as the escaped inmate, described by officials as white supremacist gang member Skylar Meade. Meade, 31, was sentenced to 20 years in 2017 for shooting at a sheriff’s sergeant during a high-speed chase.
The pair fled in a grey four-door sedan, possibly a Honda Civic, with Idaho plates, police said.
The attack occurred at 2.15am as Idaho Department of Correction officers prepared to bring Meade back to prison. Department director Josh Tewalt said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that Meade was taken to the hospital at 9.35pm on Tuesday after he engaged in “self-injurious behaviour” and medical staff determined he needed emergency care.
Surveillance video of a vehicle near the scene of a shooting at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Centre. Photo / AP
One officer shot by the suspect was in critical but stable condition, police said, while the second wounded officer had serious but non-life-threatening injuries. The third injured corrections officer also sustained non-life-threatening injuries when a responding officer — incorrectly believing the shooter was still in the emergency room and seeing an armed person near the entrance — opened fire.
“This brazen, violent, and apparently co-ordinated attack on Idaho Department of Corrections personnel, to facilitate an escape of a dangerous inmate, was carried out right in front of the emergency department, where people come for medical help, often in the direst circumstances,” Boise police chief Ron Winegar said in a statement.
Meade, 1.67m and 68kg, has face tattoos with the numbers one and 11 — for A and K, the first and 11th letters of the alphabet, representing the Aryan Knights gang he affiliated with, Tewalt said. Photos released by police also showed an A and K tattooed on his abdomen.
This photo provided by the Idaho Department of Corrections shows Skylar Meade. Photo / AP
Meade had been held in a type of solitary confinement called administrative segregation at Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Kuna, about 19km south of Boise because officials deemed him a severe security risk, Tewalt said.
Meade had been escorted in the ambulance and at the hospital by two uniformed, unarmed officers wearing ballistic vests, tailed by armed staff, Tewalt said. Under standard procedure for transporting a high-risk inmate, unarmed guards are on each side of the prisoner while an armed guard follows, he said.
Authorities did not say what security measures were in place when Meade left the hospital, or whether he was handcuffed, shackled or walking on his own.
The attack came amid a wave of gun violence at hospitals and medical centres, which have struggled to adapt to the threats.
A Saint Alphonsus spokesperson said the shooting happened in the ambulance bay by its emergency department.
“All patients and staff are safe, the medical center campus is safe and secure, and has resumed normal operations. The emergency department itself is currently under temporary lockdown while the Boise Police Department completes the investigation,” Leticia Ramirez said on Wednesday morning in a statement.
She said as an added precaution, “we have increased security on campus, all entrances to the hospital will be closed” and monitored by hospital security until further notice.
Ramirez declined to comment when asked about Meade, deferring to the police department.
