Richard Matt, one of the two killers who escaped from an upstate New York prison three weeks ago, was shot and killed by a U.S. Customs and Border patrol tactical team during the manhunt Friday, police said.
The other escaped inmate, David Sweat, remains on the loose. Police believe Sweat could be nearby and continued to search for him Friday night.
Matt was shot dead at around 3:45 p.m. in a wooded area south of the town of Malone by a member of a U.S. Customs and Border patrol tactical team, New York State Police Superintendent Joseph A. D’Amico told reporters Friday night.
“They verbally challenged him, told him to put up his hands, and at that time he was shot when he didn’t comply,” D’Amico said.
After Matt was shot, a 20-gauge shotgun was found near his body. D’Amico said. He said Matt did not fire the weapon before he was killed.
Matt and Sweat have been the targets of a massive manhunt after they used power tools to saw through their prison cells and escape from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, about 30 miles east of Malone, on June 6.
Law enforcement was searching in the area near the Canadian border after a series of burglarized cabins indicated one or both inmates might be headed toward Canada.
At around 1:50 p.m. a driver reported that his towed camper had been shot at, and searchers found a cabin that smelled of gunpowder and appeared to have been recently occupied near the site of that incident, D’Amico said. Then searchers heard a noise, he said.
“As we were doing the ground search in the area, there was movement detected by officers on the ground, what they believed to be coughs, so they knew they were dealing with humans as opposed to wildlife,” D’Amico said.
The U.S. Customs and Border patrol tactical team was flown in by helicopter, and they then found and killed Matt, D’Amico said.
Video shot by a bystander captured a swarm of law enforcement vehicles, and an officer could be heard saying, “We have one guy down.”
The shotgun is thought to have been stolen from a hunting cabin, which authorities had already connected Matt to. It is similar to a 20-gauge shotgun that was missing from the cabin, D’Amico said.
“We’ve always gone under the assumption that these men were armed,” D’Amico said. Both he and Cuomo warned residents to remain vigilant and report anything out of the ordinary to police while Sweat was still on the run.
While Sweat could be nearby, Cuomo and D’Amico said they can’t be certain because investigators haven’t found definitive evidence linking Sweat to Malone on Friday. D’Amico said that evidence had been recovered that indicated the inmates “were together at some point after the escape.”
“We are going to continue the same tactics we’ve used over the past three weeks, which is to search 24 hours a day until we find them,” D’Amico said.








