Elliot, who was locked up for decades after being convicted of four murders, made his one phone call Saturday to the Detroit Free Press to discuss his escape with the newspaper.
“I just seen an opportunity,” Elliot said. ”It was relatively simple.”
According to court records, Elliot began his escape at 6 p.m. Sunday and was out of the facility by 6:53 p.m. Corrections officers noticed Elliot was missing around 9:15 p.m. during a prisoner count.
“You can clearly see him leaving his housing unit, going to an area that prisoners are not allowed to be in, go down to the fence line and then spend the better part of an hour going through two perimeter fences,” Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said.
The fences are equipped with motion sensors and carry electric current to shock anyone who touches them, but Elliot said he used his hands to loosen and pull back fencing on vehicle gate portions that don’t carry an electric charge. Motion sensors should have triggered an alarm and flashing light in the control center, Marlan said, “but yet they didn’t go off, or he obviously wasn’t detected.”