CLALLAM BAY — Clallam Bay Corrections Center will slowly begin to come off its lockdown status beginning with breakfast today, said a prison administrator.
The prison was locked down last Wednesday after a botched escape attempt ended with one inmate dead and another moved to an intensive management unit.
The prison will be taken off lockdown status very slowly while the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office finishes its investigation into the escape attempt, said Mike Obenland, associate superintendent of operations, Tuesday.
Today, the prison will allow inmates to leave their cells to go to breakfast, Obenland said.
“We’ll do that for the rest of the week for breakfast only,” he said, with other meals served in the cells.
No visitors will be allowed during the usual visiting hours Friday, he said.
Prison administrators will re-evaluate Friday if visiting will be allowed Saturday and Sunday, Obenland said.
Two 25-year-old inmates — Kevin Newland, convicted of murdering Spokane teenager Jamie Lynn Drake in 2006, and Dominick Maldonado, who was serving a 163-year sentence after he wounded seven people in a 2005 shooting rampage at Tacoma Mall — worked together in the escape attempt, prison officials said.
At 10 a.m. last Wednesday, when one of two corrections officers took a lunch break, leaving one officer in charge of 104 inmates, Maldonado took the officer hostage with a pair of scissors, officials said.
Newland took the keys to the forklift, unchained it and drove it through the doors of the work area and into the perimeter fences before he was fatally shot by a corrections officer conducting firearms training outside the facility, officials said.
Maldonado surrendered, and remains incarcerated in high security at the prison, Obenland said.
The officer taken hostage was treated for minor injuries.