The search continued over the weekend for a convicted murderer serving time at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston who escaped Thursday night.
Arnold Nash, 65, was last seen around 8:20 p.m. Thursday and is still believed to be in the area of the minimum-security unit of the facility, which is just south of Dover-Foxcroft, according to Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Fitzpatrick.
The department late Friday asked the public to be on the lookout for the man but not to approach him. Authorities asked that people who see Nash call the Bangor barracks of the Maine State Police at 973-3700 or the Charleston prison at 285-0880.
Multiple law enforcement agencies are involved in the search, the department said.
Requests for an update on the search were not immediately returned Sunday afternoon.
Nash, who is serving a 45-year sentence for the 1991 murder and robbery of his neighbor in Sullivan, was last seen wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a light-blue shirt. He is 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighs approximately 160 pounds.
This is not the first time Nash has fled a Maine prison. In 1981, he escaped from the Maine State Prison, where he was serving time for burglary. He and another inmate — a convicted murderer — walked away from a farm work detail in mid-July of that year. They weren’t captured until weeks later, after one of Maine’s longest manhunts was well underway. The pair was spotted raiding a garden on Aug. 1, 1981, and caught four days later during a burglary, according to BDN archives.
[Remarkable manhunts in Maine history]
The escaped prisoner began serving time for the beating death of 58-year-old Wilfred Gibeault, a disabled Korean War veteran, on May 29, 1992, the commissioner said.
Nash of North Sullivan fatally bludgeoned his neighbor on a March evening in 1991 and robbed the man of $1,400 in cash that he received each month from the Veterans Administration. Nash also stole a handgun, synthetic diamond rings and clothes from Gibeault.
After yet another nationwide manhunt launched to find him, Nash laid low and used multiple aliases following the crimes until he was arrested in Bucksport about three weeks later.
Before an Ellsworth Superior Court judge in 1991, Nash pleaded guilty to the murder and robbery in an agreement with prosecutors that his prison sentence would be capped at 45 years.
He was scheduled to be released on Dec. 14, 2019, Fitzpatrick said.
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