Man slips federal authorities for 18 years over paperwork mistake

A Riverdale man who escaped from a federal prison 18 years ago managed to elude justice because of an error in his paperwork.

Roy Jones, 61, was arrested Friday after authorities figured out their mistake and tracked him down, according to the U.S. Marshals Service in Alabama.

Jones was convicted in Pennsylvania in 1992 on drug charges and sentenced to five years in prison, but in September of that year he slipped away from Federal Prison Camp Maxwell in Montgomery.

Investigators interviewed relatives and followed leads from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to Germany, but came up empty-handed.

The problem was that Jones had been convicted under the alias Ralph Jones, so authorities had been searching for the wrong guy. They had his fingerprints, but Jones stayed out of trouble and his prints never turned up in any databases again, Lawrence LaBarge, a U.S. Marshals Service deputy in Montgomery, told the AJC Monday.

The case cracked open when an investigator reviewed his file recently, LaBarge said.

LaBarge said the investigator noted that Jones actually had been convicted under the first name "Elroy." The investigator then tracked the new identity from Florida to Georgia.

It was the photograph snapped for Jones' Georgia driver's license that undid him. Investigators matched that photo with an old one of Jones and realized they'd found their man.

"If he hadn't gotten a license with a picture on it, I think he'd still be out there," said LaBarge, who is a supervising deputy marshal for the middle district of Alabama.

Jones was arrested and appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta on Monday.