New Orleans inmate arrested in Atlanta after 5 months on the run
A man who escaped from a New Orleans jail five months ago was taken back into custody Wednesday by the U.S. Marshals Service with help from the Atlanta police SWAT team and a Clayton County K-9, officials confirmed.
Derrick Groves, who was convicted of murder in 2024, had been on the run since his escape in May.
He was one of 10 inmates who made national headlines when they broke out of the Orleans Parish Jail through a hole in a cell wall behind a toilet, The Associated Press reported. Some escapees were captured the same day, while others remained on the run, according to news reports.
Groves was the last to evade law enforcement. The FBI offered a reward of $20,000 for any information leading to his arrest and warned the public he was expected to be “armed and dangerous.”
He was arrested Wednesday afternoon at a home on Honeysuckle Lane in southwest Atlanta, Frank Lempka with the Atlanta Marshals office confirmed.
Lempka said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he could not share how officials tracked Groves to Atlanta but said the New Orleans office spent “thousands of hours” working the case.
On Tuesday, the New Orleans Marshals office requested assistance from the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force.
Groves had been in Atlanta for at least a couple of weeks and “was definitely helped by a number of people throughout this whole ordeal,” Lempka said. No charges have been filed against those who helped him, and the investigation remains active.
Wednesday’s SWAT operation began around 10:30 a.m. Groves was taken into custody just after 2 p.m. and did not communicate with law enforcement until just before his capture.
“He’s a very, very dangerous individual,” Lempka said. “They took their time for their safety and his safety, and he was ultimately found hiding in the back of a crawl space in the basement.”
SWAT officers surrounded the home and deployed gas cannisters inside, Atlanta Deputy Chief Kelley Collier said in a news conference Wednesday afternoon. No one else was inside except Groves.
“A Clayton County K-9 was deployed in the crawl space of the location, and they found him in that crawl space,” Collier said.
He will be held in the Fulton County Jail as he awaits extradition to New Orleans, Lempka said.
Police found guns and drugs in the house, for which Groves could face additional charges alongside his aggravated escape charge out of Louisiana, he added.
Groves was convicted of murder last year after killing two people and injuring two others at a Mardi Gras celebration in 2018. A jury found him guilty of two counts of second-degree murder for the shooting deaths of Jamar Robinson and Byron Jackson and two counts of attempted second-degree murder for the two people who were injured, according to the district attorney’s office.
Groves faces life in prison without parole but fled before his sentencing, according to the Marshals Service.
Administrative delays, including a mistrial, had prevented his transfer to a more secure prison facility from the local jail, the outlet reported.
— Please return to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for updates.
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