By Joe Kovac Jr.
The Macon Telegraph
HOUSTON COUNTY, Ga. — The three remaining men on the loose in the wake of a five-inmate escape from the Pulaski County jail late Friday were caught Tuesday in Houston County.
Two of the fugitives — murder suspect Dennis Penix Jr., 28, and Brandon Pooler, 24 — were apprehended sometime after 3 p.m., tracked down at a mobile home on Krisken Court in Warner Robins, said deputy U.S. Marshal John Edgar of the Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force.
It was unclear what led cops to the trailer, but Edgar said the pair were hiding in back rooms at the mobile home just south of the Bibb County line along Echeconnee Creek, and that three women were being questioned for possibly harboring the men.
The street where Penix and Pooler were captured without incident sits in a neighborhood off Fairgrounds Boulevard north of Dunbar Road, about a mile west of Ga. Highway 247. Warner Robins police officers, Houston County sheriff’s deputies and members of the Georgia Department of Corrections Canine Unit assisted in Tuesday’s manhunt.
A third and last at-large escaped inmate, murder suspect Tyree Williams Jr., 33, was arrested late Tuesday near the intersection of North Davis and Ignico drives, also on the city’s north side.
Edgar said the team of cops searching for Williams received word that Williams might be in the area just west of Robins Air Force Base north of Green Street and happened to spot him as they cruised through not long before midnight.
“We saw somebody sitting behind a building smoking a cigarette,” Edgar said. It turned out to be Williams. His capture concluded a manhunt that stretched four full days.
Law enforcement officials have said that shortly before midnight on Friday five men broke out of the Pulaski County Detention Center on Badge Boulevard, which lies about 40 miles south of Macon between the Ocmulgee River and U.S. 341, behind Taylor Regional Hospital.
The men allegedly overpowered jailers and rode away in one of the officers’ Kia Sedona minivan.
One of the alleged escapees, Tyres Montan Jackson, 27, was caught by the police in Warner Robins while he was at Taco Bell on Sunday.
A tip was called in after Jackson apparently informed someone at the eatery that he was an escapee, Edgar said.
Another of the alleged fugitives, Lewis Wendell Evans III, 22, was caught shortly before midnight Sunday hiding in an outbuilding in Warner Robins, Edgar said.
Penix and Williams had been in the Pulaski jail facing murder charges in unrelated cases.
Penix was arrested in Macon in June 2017, shortly after a double slaying in Pulaski, after fleeing his brother’s High Street home and hiding from the cops for a couple of hours in nearby Washington Park.
More: 5 ‘violent’ inmates escape Ga. county jail after attacking officers
(c)2021 The Macon Telegraph (Macon, Ga.)