Lotion & Electricity: Las Vegas Area Prisoner Made Daring Escape
Occasionally you hear of a criminal so talented in their crime that you wonder, if they just applied themselves, if they could have had a different life. When Porfirio Duarte-Herrera broke out of prison in Indian Springs, just outside of Las Vegas, it was shocking. A new report shows exactly how “shocking” it was.
Duarte-Herrera was behind bars serving a life sentence for the 2010 murder of a hot dog vendor using a bomb that was set to go off when it detected motion. Obviously awful, and a shocking level of engineering. While counting down the days at the Southern Desert Correctional Center, Porfirio had a lot of time on his hands and hatched a plan to escape.
How did this Las Vegas area prisoner escape?
The Nicaragua-born Duarte-Herrera’s daring escape reads like an episode of MacGyver. He allegedly knew exactly when prison towers weren’t being manned and knew when to make his escape.
Except there’s one problem: those pesky bars. Prison cells aren’t simple to bust out of, right? Well for Porfirio, it was more like a science experiment.
Using lotion and a self-made electronic device, he was able to erode a window frame in his cell. Where he would typically lay, a dummy made of cardboard and towels was placed. Porfirio allegedly hid for hours armed with only leather gloves that are supplied to prisoners.
When the time was right, he hopped out of his cell and scaled three fences in about four minutes. Then somehow was able to walk nearly 40 miles into Las Vegas and was busted at a bus station on his way to Tijuana to make his grand escape.
Where is Porfirio Duarte-Herrera now?
While his escape was daring and he nearly got away with it, the state is not interested in being made a fool of again. He was caught and re-assigned from his medium security prison to Ely State Prison, a maximum security prison in the middle of damn near nowhere.